Tag Archives: socialsafe

Birthday Celebrations for digi.me!

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Today is our digi.me birthday!  Yes we are a year older and a year wiser!  We just wanted to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to everyone who uses digi.me regularly.  Without you we wouldn’t be celebrating our birthday today so simply put today is all about you our digi.me users.

Over the past 12 months you have seen digi.me move from SocialSafe to it’s new brand and home digi.me.  We’ve released the following new features:

  • The app now supports Emoticons & Facebook Stickers, with more being added over the coming weeks.
  • Password protection now includes a ‘Remember me’ option for ease of access
  • There’s a whole new view called ‘Flashback’ which enables you to stumble across treasured memories
  • We’ve integrated a ‘Send to’ Evernote option
  • More languages have been added: Greek, Estonian, Russian & Romanian 🙂
  • Our PDF Export feature now includes multilingual support.
  • We’’ve rebuilt the way content is stored for vastly improved security and speed and to lay the foundations for shared libraries. You’ll notice super sized photos throughout your library, improving Journal, Collections and Search. You can also now look at all your interactions with a friend just by clicking on them. Additionally, we’ve brought in support for comments on album/multiple photo posts and the much requested linking to original posts. Finally, as you may have noticed by now, we’re transitioning to our new Digi Me name so you have a shiny new app icon to click. After restarting the app, it is important that you follow the prompts to back up, update and protect your existing library.

Alongside all those new goodies we’ve also made enhancements to the existing features.

We look forward to making the next year even more exciting with lots more new features and functionality.  Watch this space for more details about what is to come and if you really can’t wait why not take a look at our roadmap!

If you have enjoyed digi.me help us celebrate by giving us a shout out on Twitter.  We are also still accepting people onto our early adopter programme, so if that is of interest to you please do sign up here.

Digi.me: The Results – User Survey 2015

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Firstly a BIG thank you to everyone who completed our survey over the last few months.  Your insights have been invaluable as has your feedback. Those of you who claimed your account upgrade at the end of the survey should find that your account has now been upgraded. If you are having any issues with this please let us know.

We promised to share the results of the survey with you and what better way to do that than in an infographic.

Click here or on the image below to see the full survey results!

survey results thumbnail

If you are just hearing about digi.me today then why not try us out for free by downloading our software here.

SocialSafe v6.2 Released – Further Instagram Integration And Bug Fixes

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Late last week we released version 6.2 of SocialSafe that includes further backup and integration on Instagram accounts and some other changes.

Previous versions had a more limited set of capabilities for backing up Instagram, with only photos, comments, tags and likes being brought down from the cloud. Now with SocialSafe 6.2, all of your profile information and contacts are backed up, and integrated into the journal. This means that your Instagram content will be visible through the calendar, and you can now also search across all of your tags, likes, comments and contacts associated with your account.

search instagram backups

We also had a minor niggle with Google+ by way of the fact that users would have to sign in each time they wanted to sync their account – a bit of a pain, especially if you’d been taking advantage of the scheduled backup function. Well, our developers worked swiftly to re-instate unlimited authorisation for Google+ backups so everything should be running smoothly again for that.

Those two main changes aside, there were some other minor bug fixes and UI enhancements incorporated into SocialSafe 6.2, so please show your appreciation for all the hard work that our development team continually put in by leaving a comment or ‘Like’ to tell them how much you enjoy the product they have created.

LinkedIn Now Has iPad App – Backup Your LinkedIn Contacts With SocialSafe

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Yesterday saw the release of the LinkedIn iPad app, as well as updated and revamped versions of its existing iPhone and Android apps. As of February 2012, the service had in excess of 150m users across the world. Now that the experience is available in iPad format, it stands to reason that there may be another surge in sign-ups.

If you want details of what the LinkedIn iPad app has to offer, then I’ll just direct you to Mashable instead of reproducing what they’ve written: LinkedIn Launches iPad App, Takes New Direction.

As soon as a user populated service is available (or in this case,more readilyavailable) in mobile format it is a fair assumption that the rate of content creation will increase. Anyone who is a regular reader of this blog will probably have worked out where I’m going with this… Who looks after this data you create and what happens if it disappears?

While there is an increasing number of business related accounts on Facebook and Twitter (which can all be backed up with SocialSafe), LinkedIn remains the exclusively business orientated social network. If you were to temporarily lose access or worse still suffer permanent deletion of your business contacts then this can have dire consequences.

Enterprise and Pro users of SocialSafe have the ability to backup LinkedIn contacts, updates and profile (we’re working on backing up groups in SocialSafe v6.5) to their own PC or Mac. This video shows just how simple it is to backup a LinkedIn profile and what you can actually do with you data once it is downloaded:

If you’d like to backup your LinkedIn profile then visit the SocialSafe website to start your offline digital journal today. Be sure to look at the Features section to see what else you can backup from your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and Viadeo accounts.

Do we need an Export button for everything?

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A recent Techcrunch response to Jason Calacanis’s Facebook dig alerted me to their call for an export button.

SocialSafe is Facebook’s export button.

What we don’t do though is export everything you and your friends generate (Jason suggests Facebook offer an export for your complete social graph), for good reason. Our focus with SocialSafe’s continued development is to export and backup YOUR content directly to YOUR computer, privately and securely. This avoids the need for increasingly complex privacy settings and multi directional permissions between you and your friends. Keep it simple! Facebook have had enough trouble with privacy settings for all of us. You couldn’t import your Facebook social graph anywhere else and couldn’t easily import it back into Facebook either.

We are however continuing our work to fully utilise Facebook’s apis so that you can export/backup all that you have created for your Facebook .. and expanding SocialSafe’s capabilities to include the backing up of your data on other social networks.

But it’s not just about backing up. It would be very easy for us to simply export everything into one unreadable file and store it somewhere on your computer as a backup, but what use is that if you can’t view it? We have been working busily over the last few months on a better way to view this backed up information.

All will be revealed very soon and it’ll be a FREE update to all our existing users.

Cyber hackers target Facebook

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Over the last few months since we launched SocialSafe as a backup tool for Facebook, we have seen it used for many different purposes: for account security (our original intent); to overcome the Walled Garden issue with getting data out of Facebook; to preserve your social history for the future using our Time Capsule feature.  However, the core functionality of allowing you to have your own copy of your Facebook data seems as important as ever as Facebook, with its truly phenomenal reach, becomes an ever bigger target for cyber hackers.

Today there was yet another article (from www.mediamughals.com) which shows the increasing sophistication of attacks on Facebook and hence the threat to user’s data.  Many of the attacks to date seem to be intended to lure users to other non-Facebook sites which can then infect a user’s computer with viruses, spyware, et al; however, the increasing sophistication of those targeting Facebook will pose ever greater threats to user’s own Facebook accounts.  If someone with bad intent can take over a valid Facebook account and send out spurious status messages with links to malware, then the likelihood of friends of that hijacked user going to the bad sites must increase significantly.  Facebook account hijacking will unfortunately become more common it seems – you only need to enter the terms “Facebook” and “hack” into Google or a Twitter search to see the intent out there.  Having your account hijacked will probably result in it being closed by Facebook and/or your data lost – a major blow in this social network era.

The benefits of using Facebook are its incredible reach and its many useful functions; the perils are that its popularity leads those with bad intent to see it is a juicy target.  However, you do it, having your own data available to you to be able to restore your account seems to be as prudent a step in protecting against cyber hackers as having a virus checker on your PC.

Facebook adds Status tagging

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Just start typing and Facebook will find the closed 4 matches
Just start typing and Facebook will find the closed 4 matches

Using the Twitter adopted ‘@’ in your Facebook status update now allows you to tag people, groups, profiles. There’s no limit to the number of people you can tag within a Status and when you do so, it appears in their feeds too. Yet another way to have direct conversations with your friends. Is it a Twitter killer? Nah. Will it clog up our Walls? Definitely. There’s currently no setting that can control whether these appear in your feed. Get prepared to see lots of half conversations.

One possible solution is to head over to Facebook’s Prototype Applications and install Recent Comments Filter, this presents a new Wall View only showing updates that your friends thought interesting enough to comment on.

Of course it’s not all bad news. You can comment on a Status update and these are nicely nested underneath – something I’d personally wished for on Twitter for some time. Facebook are great at presenting ways for us to talk with and share with our friends.

Currently Facebook do not provide the gateway to export this new form of conversation so this will not be backed up in the forthcoming update to SocialSafe. This new update will back up your Status Updates and your friends comments on those. We’ll be watching this closely and will increase this functionality as soon as we can.

Facebook – A Responsible Approach to Data Ownership

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Our application SocialSafe was launched in mid-June this year and in its first version allowed users to download to their desktop computer details of their Friends, their own profile, all their photos and also 3rd party photos in which the user was tagged.  All this was accomplished using the comprehensive Facebook API which developers can use for free, subject to Facebook’s Terms of Service.  From reviews and comments received SocialSafe has been welcomed by all as an extremely valuable service; however, whilst acknowledging the utility of SocialSafe, Facebook have raised the question to us of whether we are breaching the privacy rules associated with Facebook data by downloading tagged photos without explicit permission from the users who posted the photos.

We had considered this originally and felt that as the SocialSafe user was in the photo and as the originator’s privacy settings allowed the user to see and be tagged in the photo that this was giving implicit permission for the user to download the photo; however, as this was not a clear cut case we included a notification process to tell the photo originator that our SocialSafe user had downloaded the photo.  After receiving an indication from Facebook that they felt that explicit permission was required, rather than the implicit permission we were relying on, we re-evaluated our policy.  Taking the view that we have already expressed on this blog that the data belongs to the originator (summed up in the phrase “Its your data”), we are making some changes because whilst it is OK to download to your desktop any data you have originated on Facebook through the Facebook API, we believe downloading any data from another user does require explicit permission from that other user.

As a result we will this week put out an update to SocialSafe which temporarily removes the tagged photo download functionality (the update also includes a new Time Capsule feature).  We will be restoring the tagged photo functionality in a subsequent version we hope to release in two to three weeks, but this time we will include a smart method for friends of the SocialSafe user to explicitly authorise or prohibit the download of their photos for that SocialSafe user.  This will involve users in an extra step, but will ensure that SocialSafe follows the cleanest data policy of all – the user who originates data owns it and must authorise anybody else to use it.

We recognise that users who have bought SocialSafe to date have done so in good faith believing that the existing functionality will remain as is, whilst future updates will come with increasing functionality (such as the Time Capsule feature being released this week).  We believe that we have found a good solution to downloading tagged photos, but ultimately some of our existing users may not agree and may feel that we have unilaterally reduced the available functionality to their detriment.  If you are such a user then we are happy to offer you an unconditional refund of your payment to us – please just contact us with a request for repayment and we will do so within 3 days and hopefully sooner.

At SocialSafe we are, as our name suggests, committed to keeping your social data safe and to having the most explicit and correct privacy policy to protect everyone’s data.  We believe the change in policy we have described above reflects this and we hope you feel so too.  Future updates to SocialSafe will follow this policy, as will other products from the iBundle stable (iBundle and 1minus1 are Joint Venture partners in the production of SocialSafe).

Julian Ranger

Chairman iBundle & SocialSafe

SocialSafe – a new Facebook application – can you trust us?

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Over the weekend I engaged with @treypennington through Twitter and one aspect of the conversation was how can users trust our SocialSafe Facebook application because we are a new business? – on what basis is trust given or earned?  A fascinating question for us at SocialSafe because we are involved in backups of user’s Facebook data – if we are not trusted to follow Facebook privacy rules then people won’t use our application.  I have searched the internet on this issue and found lots of problem reports of spam generation, phishing and worse, but not a lot on how to actually determine whether an application or service is trustworthy – clearly a difficult issue.

Facebook contains an enormous amount of data about yourself and your friends and when you let an application use your logon details that is a huge amount of trust you are placing in the application – the Facebook API allows access to most of the data Facebook has for you, and this is not controlled in the same way as your Facebook privacy settings work for friends.  There are rules and principles posted by Facebook for application authors to follow, but have they followed them? – there is no way to check.

First stop for anyone looking at a new service if you do not know who is providing it or have not been recommended to it by someone else you trust, must be the Privacy Policy of the website behind the application/service and/or their T&Cs/Terms of Service.  See what they say and think about whether the use they are going to put your data to is reasonable.  For example we at SocialSafe make a strong point that we do NOT see any of your data – our application sits on your computer and your data downloads from Facebook to your computer without us at SocialSafe seeing it in any way (other than anonymous stats that you have to enable).

Another aspect of trust that Trey mentioned which I had not thought of before was who are we? – not the company, but the founders behind the company.  A good point I think – if we put down our biographies and there is some history to what we’ve done then that is at least a pointer to our trustworthiness or not.  Of course we could lie in those bios, but some searching on the internet would expose that (I hope!).  This is difficult for the younger entrepreneurs I acknowledge as they do not necessarily have the history of accomplishments, but honesty can come across in writing and so even the bio of an 18 year old entrepreneur is worthwhile I suggest.  We are changing our web site to reflect this point and will refer to our two founding companies, iBundle and 1Minus1, and will be adding bios to our details at iBundle.

So that gives two methods of researching the trustworthiness or not of an app.  Apart from personal recommendations (and on what basis do those involve knowing whether the app is trustworthy?) what other methods are there? – I’d love to hear from you what you think of this issue and any methods you use.

A social web has to be a trustworthy web – anything that can be done to improve true trust (whilst retaining usability) must be a good thing.