If you need to delete a photo for whatever reason, you have to reset your stream.

First, reset your Photo Stream on iCloud.com.

Second, turn off Photo Stream on your iOS devices by going to the Settings app, then iCloud, then into Photo Stream where you can turn it off.

You should now be able to delete any and all photos from your device.

When I first joined, I needed my precious @indiana.edu email address. I was friending and being friended by anyone related to the 8th floor of Briscoe Shoemaker in the Northwest neighborhood of Indiana University for 2005–2006 and any combination of those keywords. No one knew what they were doing. Friending attractive strangers was encouraged and the norm.

Now, I’m still friends with some attractive strangers and have grown my social network to include distant family members who are reportedly related. The dynamic of friending someone on Facebook has changed. The consequences of using Facebook have evolved as well. I should know well being employed by a company that provides products and services to regain online privacy and build an online reputation.

After hundreds of blog posts and thousands of tweets, it is clear I’m not afraid of sharing online. In fact, I really enjoy it which is why I try so many new social apps and services. If I’ve noticed anything in the past few years, it’s that every new social play experiments with maximizing reach while trying to control privacy. Many services have turned to asynchronous relationships, where you can follow or friend someone without them reciprocating, and now Facebook allows you to use their service in this way. Plenty of people will make this out to be a move against Twitter, but I think it more importantly removes the confusion between having a ‘Page’ as an individual and using your individual account as a ‘Page.’

You can now subscribe to me on Facebook. I’ve been posting updates to ‘the public’ for a while assuming they were easily discoverable. Now, they’ll be conveniently delivered to your News Feed.

This allows me to treat Facebook somewhat like Twitter (I’m not ready to connect the two). I can choose to maintain friendships with people I actually consider to be friends without cutting off access to what someone might have found interesting by being my friend.

Allowing others to subscribe to the content you share on Facebook, allows you to evaluate the friendships you truly value. It increases engagement with the site (and ads from a business perspective). It also should be a wakeup call to people who have or are approaching maxing out the 5,000 friend limit to rethink what a friend really is. Relationships on Facebook should become more meaningful because of this.

I will be actively de-friending people on Facebook so that I can take in more of the updates and news from people I care about instead of relying on Facebook to filter, silo, and group it for me. Please don’t take it personally. I’m not hard to contact. I approach Twitter the same way and keep up with about 600 businesses and individuals (a little less than twice the number of Facebook friends I kept before this announcement).

To simplify how I’ll use social networks, as they are today, going forward:

• Facebook: You don’t need to ask to crash on my couch.
• LinkedIn: We’ve worked together, or I would like to work with you.
• Twitter: I’m following you because you are interesting, not because someone told me you were interesting.
• foursquare: I’m not going to be creeped out if you find me here.
• Phone: You are more important than a Facebook friend or you don’t know me.

I received a lot of “why” and “what are you using now” replies on Twitter. As for why, my financial behavior isn’t conducive to the algorithms and trends Mint uses. Also, my financial accounts which Mint tracked were often broken and needed more effort from me than the data that was scraped was worth. I couldn’t remember the last month where I didn’t get an email warning me of high spending in some budgeted category. When I realized that most of my interactions with Mint were to correct accounts and dismiss alerts I didn’t care about, I knew it was time to ditch the service.

What am I using now? A spreadsheet in Google Docs that lists my income, expenses, debt, and assets. The manual updating is a little tedious but always correct. It gives me a simplistic overview of where I stand and easily tracks things like iTunes and Amazon spending. With some effort, I’m sure I could have setup some sort of budget on Mint to do the same thing.

Mint’s budgeting is far from perfect when the slightest of variables is added. As an example, Mint probably would have sent me an alert about my high spending at the Beverages and More in Menlo Park this month. It’s the first month I’ve ever shopped there, and I’m sure their databases know it’s a liquor store. Did they know my girlfriend came to visit and went on a 72 hour champagne diet? Those four days would have thrown off the entire monthly budget for bars/alcohol in Mint triggering another alert.

The months of March and April were very extreme in terms of finance for me. I took an impromptu cross-country trip, went on vacation, moved across the country, started a new job, got a signing bonus, got a new apartment while still keeping my old apartment, bought a car, paid a lot of car related expenses like insurance, registration, and gas, bought new furniture, sold stock, received a court settlement, did freelance work, and paid taxes (lots of taxes). Mint never stood a chance to comprehend all of this (I barely did/do). The time it would have taken to adjust budgets, manage accounts, categorize purchases, etc. wasn’t worth it.

I still have to manage two rents for the next three months. My retirement investments are going to roll over and whatnot soon. I have a lot of new expenses thanks to my automobile that would take Mint a few months to normalize. Deleting my account was the simplest solution. I can do the same, if not more, without it which means it’s time to get rid of it.

Since joining Reputation.com, I’ve also been more mindful of what data I put online. Mint collects some of the most sensitive information I have to offer. Even though they claim to be very secure, not having my information is more secure. (They did confirm all of my information was deleted when I closed my account)

Mint is a great tool that works for a lot of people. I’m just not one of them. As I get older and life becomes more routine, perhaps I’ll consider using them again. Monitoring my finances myself has not been a chore, and if anything, has become more accurate. My personal information and financial institution logins are more secure since they aren’t kept by Mint. For now, I’ve found the best solution for me.

That’s the entire email. I like that it’s short and not filled with junk I don’t need or care about, but that’s mainly because it’s empty. They could add a lot of value to their emails just by giving a link to the person who just followed you.

Every Tumblr username is a subdomain of tumblr.com so from a programming standpoint, they just need to copy the value they’re putting in the subject of the email and put it as the subdomain of the link. It’s a 30 second fix that drives me crazy and could make their emails 300x more useful. Now I can go check out the person who just followed me with one click and decide to follow them or not on their page. I’m sure the Tumblr team is cooking up some fancy HTML email to rival Twitter’s, but in the time being this would be a much appreciated upgrade.

The postcard read:

It’s not every day you meet someone who defines themselves with an MB monogram.

That’s why we thought you’d like an MB travel mug. It can fit in a beverage try, house hot or cold liquids — and you’ll always know that it’s yours because your initials are on it.

So far, so good. I was actually a little excited since I typically just joked with friends about the connection between my initials and the bank’s name. Then came the list of hoops to jump through for the measly mug.

* To get your free, no-strings-attached MB travel mug, go to www.facebook.com/mbfinancialbank and click on the Events tab. That’s where you’ll find a registration form and official drawing rules. Bring your completed form into your nearby MB banking center. We’ll give you your mug — and enter your form into a drawing for a $1,000 gift card. Don’t delay! The offer expires on December 31, 2010. The gift card winner will be announced on our Facebook page on January 4, 2011.

That’s it! Feel free to share this with others you know with the same initials. We “MBers” need to stick together.

Take this postcard, go online, print out a form, fill it out, take it to a branch, check back online. Thanks, but no thanks. Why didn’t they just mail me the form to fill out and eliminate going online? Did they hope I’d “like” their page? Why didn’t they make that a requirement? It’s just one extra click. It gets worse.

The form is an image posted to the wall of an event. Semantics aside, it’s not intuitive as evident by the other comments on the wall. If MB was an actually popular brand with lots of comments, most would have never been able to find it.

After notifying me of this promotion via mail, they need my mailing address? Why do they need my phone and email? They’re my bank. They already have this information. I’m guessing by “Facebook Name” they mean your customized profile URL. What are they going to do with that? Friend me? Find me so they can suggest I become a fan? Stalk me in order to decide what offers I may or may not qualify for?

The only reason I could come up with to explain this painful process is that my bank is absolutely clueless when it comes to technology, the internet, and social media.

How I Would Run This Same Promotion

I’m assuming the purpose of this promotion was to engage with customers through Facebook by rewarding them with a physical gift. They have email addresses for most if not all of their customers. Send the contents of the postcard in an email with a link to their Facebook page. Make it a requirement to “like” their page.

Use a simple Facebook app like Contact Form to collect shipping addresses. I’m guess that the money they spent on printing these postcards, mailing them, and manually processing the forms costs more than shipping the mugs free to their customers.

Create an event that happens on January 4, 2011 and by marking your RSVP as “attending” you are entered into the $1,000 gift card drawing. Tell the customers they can invite their friends to enter thus spreading the bank’s brand via word of mouth. However you randomly pick the winner, have them fill out that same contact form to get their shipping information or pick a retailer like Amazon that allows you to send gift cards electronically.

Running their promotion completely online simplifies it for everyone involved. They gain Facebook fans and only collect information they need. Customers have a better understanding of how to participate and what’s being done with their information.

MB Financial had a great opportunity to make a genuine connection with a subset of their customers but botched it with their laborious and confusing process.

I will give them credit for attempting to let users backup their check-ins by providing an RSS feed (http://brightkite.com/streambackup.rss). The biggest problem with this solution is that it requires basic auth, meaning you have to log in to Brightkite first, which most RSS readers don’t support. Another problem is not knowing what to do with the RSS feed. The simplest solution I came up with was to have Momento, an iPhone app that archives your online activity, save the basic information from Brightkite before the RSS feed is removed on December 31st.

1. Use Chrome to save the RSS text

I tried Safari and Firefox first, but Chrome ended up doing the trick. You must log in to Brightkite first before visiting the RSS URL. Save the text output as ‘streambackup.rss’ or whatever you like.

2. Upload RSS file. Download Momento app.

I have web hosting space which makes it easy to throw files somewhere public any time I want. If you don’t have your own web hosting space, I’d suggest using a Dropbox public folder. If you don’t already have the Momento app, go download it. It’s worth the money.

3. Add feed in Momento

Launch Momento. Tap the settings icon in the upper left hand corner. Tap Manage Feeds > Add Feed > Web Feed > Enter URL of feed. Wherever you put the RSS file, enter that URL. Mine was http://maxbeatty.com/bk/streambackup.rss

4. Check it imported properly

It might take a minute to get all the info downloaded. I compared the stream in my browser to the calendar in the app to see it had matched up fine. I was disappointed to see that the pictures weren’t cached.

Martin May, who moved on from Brightkite to forkly, built another archiver in Ruby. I’m hoping to get it setup in the next few days to see if it’s a better alternative.

I’m sad to see Brightkite throw away this data. I’ve had over 900 check-ins with them and not even 300 on foursquare and Gowalla combined. Social networks are my generation’s scrapbooks. It’s fun to look back at all you’ve done and having to scramble to backup these memories should open a few people’s eyes about who owns their data and ultimately memories. Kudos to Momento for creating a great app and taking a step in the right direction in allowing users to archive their social networking lives.

To use ReclaimPrivacy.org’s privacy scanner, you have to drag a JavaScript bookmarklet to your browser and click on it once you’re logged into Facebook. Running a bookmarklet from your browser is the same as downloading an executable to your desktop and running it. Wait, it says it’s “an independent and open tool” and “the source code and its development will always remain open and transparent.” How many out of the 112,000 that shared this (at the time of writing) on Facebook and probably 10x that that used it looked at the source code? How many people out of that small percentage were jQuery buffs who understood what was going on in the code?

Wait! You’re concerned about your privacy on Facebook to the point you will blindly run executing code on your personal computer.

If I were Matt Pizzimenti, I would have posted whatever was on your clipboard as your Facebooks status just to teach you a lesson in trusting “open and transparent” code. But seriously, kudos for Matt trying to address the privacy concerns of others. From what I’ve seen this tool is well put together with the best intentions. That being said, I’m about to rip into his misleading nomenclature and copy. Please remember I mean to help.

I ran the privacy scanner. I had already adjusted the new privacy settings last week so I wanted to see what his tool would say. Let’s go top to bottom:

insecure Instant Personalization is currently sharing personal information with non-Facebook websites.

I know. I set it that way. That doesn’t make it insecure. I might be one of the few people who likes that Yelp knows who my Facebook friends are and can automatically friend me on their service and show me what reviews my friends have made. I am, after all, most likely going out with those people to eat. That scares some people but I look at it as being able to forever bypass importing my email contacts to see if my friends are already using this service.

caution some of your personal information is exposed to the entire Internet, you should tweak personal settings

Go ahead and tweak your personal settings until the cows come home. Some of your personal information will always be exposed to the entire Internet. That kind of statement is misleading. Even the most private of private people still have some personal information floating around the Internet. It is inevitable whether you like it or not. Tweaking your personal settings on Facebook will only protect the next stupid status update or profane interest from being cached by a search engine.

caution some of your contact information is exposed to the entire Internet, you should tweak contact settings

Again, I know. I’m old enough where I’m not afraid to be contacted by strangers and have enough confidence in my spam filter that my privacy is not being compromised by sharing some contact information. At this point you might be thinking (or screaming), “Of course you don’t care! You have websites that bare all and don’t take privacy seriously!” I actually do take privacy somewhat seriously but more importantly realistically. If it took a few tech blogs to wake you up to the reality of how un-private your life is when it comes to data, you should really start paying closer attention.

caution some of your friends, tags, and connections information is exposed to the entire Internet, you should…

get the point by now. If you don’t want to be associated with one of your friends, de-friend them. If you’re embarrassed about a picture you’re tagged in, untag it. If you’ve listed Can’t Hardly Wait as one of your favorite movies and don’t want anyone to know, do not tell them. Facebook is not out rummaging through your used DVD sales or tracking what Hillary Duff album you recently deleted from your iTunes library. They are simply organizing and connecting information you provide to them.

insecure your friends can accidentally share your personal information

At this point, I am honestly to the point of, “so what?” What are they going to share about me? If this is bringing on flashbacks of junior high, that’s because it is extremely juvenile. Some of your friends are gossipers sharers but instead of spreading lies rumors it might be something you, again, chose to share. And finally my favorite that conveniently wraps this all up:

secure you have blocked all known applications that could leak your personal information

What does that even mean? The author actually “changed ‘good’ settings to say ‘secure’ since people were getting confused about whether ‘good’ was the highest setting”. This is a real joke of security. He apparently forgot to consider Facebook as an application. That application HAS leaked your personal information which is why he built this tool to begin with!

That is the entire reason people are upset with Facebook! Facebook does not respect your privacy. They could leak share your information at any time. More importantly, they could get hacked any time and your information wouldn’t just get shared but stolen. Now what setting do you change to prevent your information from being stolen?

The Internet was founded on principles of open and free communication. Now that our lives are stored on it, and Facebook has cavalierly opened them up for sharing. If you remember that they cannot share what you do not post, your privacy is not at risk (at least on Facebook). Information is gold on the Internet, and as my grandfather says, he who has the gold makes the rules.

Collaborating on documents has become an intricate part of our academic and professional lives. The de facto service until now has been Google Docs but it has some barriers and limitations. If you want to collaborate with someone on a Google Doc, you all have to use your Google accounts usually in the form of Gmail addresses. But not everyone uses Gmail and giving out your email address is a pretty personal thing these days.

True, more universities are turning to Google Apps that would allow students to use their school email address to collaborate instead of their personal email address. Yes, Google is making strides in the OpenID arena to make it easier to sign up for new services with existing identities from other services. But…

Everyone has Facebook. There is no barrier. Privacy settings will allow you collaborate on a project without opening the floodgates of your personal info. Sharing will be easier because instead of hunting down someone’s email (read: Gmail) you’ll already be friends with them and can just start typing in their name for Facebook to autocomplete.

I love simplicity. I have no problem with using Google Docs for everything. There is no functionality that Microsoft Office had over Google Docs that I’ve missed in the past 5 years. Unfortunately, not everyone can get by with the minimalism of Google Docs.

My generation was raised on Microsoft Office. It’s the reason people think features are missing from Google Docs. Office, not Works or any other off brand, was a requirement in my educational process. I even taught how to use it as an undergraduate instructor. The trend of not being able to escape M$ Office continues with Docs.com. It’ll be full of features that’ll take Google and others some time to mimic.

When you combine the unescapable Office suite with the widespread identity power of Facebook, you are left with a very familiar experience even though the tool is brand new.

The only thing I don’t like about Docs.com is how it’s launching. Microsoft doesn’t do Beta (unless you count WindowsME and Vista which you should). How will the invite system work? Will I be able to share or collaborate with my Facebook friends who haven’t received an invite yet? Will inviting them to share or collaborate trigger them to be invited? What happens when someone doesn’t want to add the Docs.com app for their Facebook account (or accidentally declines)? I don’t think a slow rollout to squash bugs is advisable especially after what happened to Google Wave.

Google was the master of slow rollout/invite only with Gmail. I think Wave flopped because it was a collaborative platform and couldn’t build any steam when users’ friends didn’t have accounts to interact with. Google then overreacted with Buzz by auto-including all of your contacts. I’ll be interested in how both Facebook and Microsoft handle this with Docs.com. If they do it right, they control the future of online document collaboration.

Convenience

Checking in universally is obviously the biggest convenience. If I really want to get the word out about where I am, I don’t have to launch, search, and check-in on three different apps. Since Check.in is a web app, it is cross-device compatible (no need for a separate iPhone app, Android app, and Blackberry app).

As you saw in the demo video, Check.in tries to match venues on each service to make the process easier. I’ve been using Check.in for about a week and have noticed that more and more venues are automatically matched without me having to manually verify. They, of course, use the Brightkite location database by default, which I like, because their venues are based on Google registered businesses instead of user generated spots like on Foursquare and Gowalla.

Compromises

The flip side to the convenience of being able to check-in everywhere at once is annoyingly notifying all of your friends who use multiple services. When my roommate Andy checks in using Check.in, I get push notifications from my Brightkite app, Foursquare app, and Gowalla app. The simple solution is to just remove all of those apps. But wait–

Check.in is exactly and only for what it’s named. You lose out on the “gaming” of Foursquare and Gowalla when you use it. You can’t add a tip or to-do, or see who’s the mayor of where you just checked in on Foursquare. You can’t drop or pick ups items, or collect pins from Gowalla. You still get credit for the check-in, but the “game” features are the heart of Foursquare and Gowalla’s business deals since they reward users for checking in at places. You can’t discover that a bar nearby is having a special or pickup a virtual item to redeem for a physical good. This is obviously good for Brightkite who has been all but forgotten in headlines over the past few months.

The biggest compromise you make in using Check.in is seeing where your friends are. This is why I still have the other native apps. I’m only friends with people I actually know and want to meet up with on these services. I care about where they are and if they are nearby.

Check.in is a one way street, but a great one way street. The experience is awesome, and I love the initiative. I’m excited to see more universal location apps come out as the power struggle continues among all the different services.

Group text messaging allows you to send one text message to an SMS shortcode and have it distributed to a list of contacts. The recipients of the group can then reply to all or just to the original sender. It’s a time saver and helps organize and inform groups quickly and conveniently.

Tatango has been around since 2007 and was once a free service. Last summer they discontinued the free service in favor of tiered subscription plans. When I tried the service last December, it was buggy, unpolished, and not very accepted by my group for those reasons. The backend was clunky to add users and it was nearly impossible to identify individuals since they showed up as (123) XXX 6789. Getting the syntax right to send to the proper group or subgroup was confusing. People who replied were even more confused often sending their private reply to everyone creating a flood of annoying texts. Multiple users had a hard time removing themselves from the group once they joined and figured out it wasn’t for them (see: flood of annoying texts). Perhaps it was how we were using the system (allowing everyone to send messages) that resulted in the poor results, but there is definitely room for Tatango to improve on its end.

Now Brightkite has thrown their hat in the ring and look to be offering a very similar service with some add-ons for free. They’ve already put together a great location based social network so I expect their backend to be very polished and free of bugs. You can also send pictures and locations with their Group Text service which is great for “hey let’s all meet up” or “hey everyone look at this” scenarios. Brightkite does limit the group size to 25 members but that doesn’t seem like much of a limitation to me. The best part about the Brightkite service is that “your friends don’t need to join Brightkite to take part in your conversations.” They don’t even have to use SMS; they can use the iPhone app instead.

It should be mentioned that both Tatango and Brightkite Group Text are only for US based numbers. This was huge drawback when I used Tatango since a majority of our group were from outside the US.

The services are not exactly the same or targeted at the same market, but I don’t see why any group under 25 people would pay $24 or $49 a month for Tatango when they could use Brightkite for free. If Group Text catches on for Brightkite, it is easy to assume they too would have to start charging, but by the same token they would then be able to go after Tatango’s Plus and Pro clientele.

What do you think? Does Tatango offer something worth paying for? Is Brightkite purposely going after Tatango’s market? Is group text messaging really that useful with Twitter and Facebook SMS updates?