Blogging Fool

One of the most interesting things about the service, when Twitter first launched, was the way in which the users customized the service to meet their needs – from circuit bent plant feeders that alarmed them when they needed watering to (the soon to be obsolete) hash tags.  But in the meantime, beyond the CNN and Ashton Kutcher and downtime hype, the essential value of this platform is being overlooked.  I want to briefly share my thoughts about how to choose the right people to follow on Twitter in order to understand how to unlock its potential.

One of the things to consider when using Twitter is that following celebrities and famous sports stars right away is sort of defeating the purpose of Twitter, because you are simply going right back to listening to the mainstream; Twitter can serve as a bona fide news service, and to assume that it is just a way of stalking popularity is to miss out on its real virtues.  One of the beauties of Twitter is that you can find niche experts on subjects far closer to your heart and, if you choose just the right ones, the sort that understand the right pacing of a good Twitterstream and the right way to compose those Tweets, you can actually create a perfectly customized data stream for yourself that will keep you both informed, engaged and inspired and never bothered by this amazing new technology.

Information Wants To Be Free – As in Free Speech, Not Free Beer

Consider creating separate Twitter accounts depending on your interest, something akin to creating information channels, or separate subject tabs in iGoogle.  For example you might create a Twitter account that just follows food writers and recipes.  And maybe you can create a second Twitter account that is just about robots and artificial intelligence and the latest tech news.

You don’t have to have followers in order to enjoy your Twitter account – too many people who come to Twitter become too quickly obsessed with gathering followers.  This is counter intuitive and secondary to the benefits of the medium.

Be Your Own Tastemaker

Acquiring followers is really only important if you have a product to promote or have serious issues with popularity – obviously we all want to have a message get out there but until you really learn the ins and outs of Twitter, you may not know how to best use the platform for conveying your message.  I recommend first following great Tweeters and once you have really fine tuned a great Twitter stream, you’ll be that much better at doing it yourself and the followers will then start to come as you interact and reply to the people you already admire. Furthermore, consider using the “Favorite this Tweet” option – the little star beside any given tweet if you are using Twitter proper. This is an often overlooked but powerful feature for handpicking the best of the bunch as they whiz past.

To link people to your top picks of the day, simply append

/favorites

to your twitter URL. For example if your Twitter account is http://twitter.com/ConstantChange then just link people to http://twitter.com/constantchange/favorites to show off what you felt was most recently relevant.

By aggregating an excellent collection of Tweeters to your profile, you will have a robust, bleeding-edge, pro-level source of insight that will ping you as it happens.  Who knows, before long you may even forge a relationship with some of your heroes, leaders in your field of interest, or better yet, become one yourself.

Follow my Tweets @ConstantChange

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Be Wary of the The AVGFree71 Virus and other Virus Scanning Impostors -  and a Path to Solving It, Or Avoiding It Altogether

Last week several close friends saw a pop-up from their anti-virus software alerting them that their computers were rife with Trojans of all sorts. They were shown the list of threats and then asked to register / upgrade the software with a license key to remove the threats from their computers.

The software appeared to be the very reliable, fully functional and free AVG Anti-Virus software.  But it wasn’t.

Beware a fake virus scanner luring you in. Photo is the property of "What's On My PC?" Please click to visit their site, or see link at the bottom of this article

In fact it was a self-persistent and very well developed trojan that wreaks havoc on computers, downloads additional data and software and buries itself so deep that it took me two days just to figure out what it was.

An exhausting process of trial and error and elimination of possibilities eventually pointed me to a rootkit stealth file called AVGFree71 – a file that seemed like a hangover from an old AVG Free installation, but in fact a wickedly tenacious piece of code that nor McCafee, Perfect Uninstaller or MalwareBytes could get to.

The only solution was to finally install powerful Malware removal software call Prevx 3.0 – but only by selecting the option to generate a random name for the installation executable file – it seems that this Trojan was pre-pared for almost any anti-virus software out there and capable of blocking them from installing or running.  For example – McCafee wouldn’t install because it required that I first uninstall “AVG Free 7.1″.  Of course, searching for this installation proved fruitless and there literally no solutions offered on any user forum I found – only some poor confused victims asking for help.

Prevx did successfully identify the infection and even removed it, but the nasty bugger pulled out some vital organs with it and I eventually ended up reinstalling my whole OS and applications to be sure.

So I wanted to share my experience – not because it is the best or the only way, but it WILL get you there and I don’t want to see any more poor folk surrendering their credit card numbers in a vain and desperate attempt to “clean” their computers.

But if you DO get a pop up that warns you, mysteriously, of virus infections, and its coming from software that you don’t remember having installed on your system, hit Alt-F4 to immediately exit out of the program, do not hit the “X” to close out of the window (and for the love of all that is holy, do not enter you credit card number in a panic) and you should circumvent the possibility of infection via this deeply underhanded method altogether.

As I was writing this article I happened to stumble across the first other article – “Protect yourself against FAKE Anti-Virus and FAKE Anti-Spyware Software…” – about the same topic that even remotely (and in fact quite extensively) covers this topic.  I recommend you go there and check it out before doing anything else.

Please note that either I or this site are in any way affiliated with Prevx software and the above endorsement is strictly an opinion and in no way constitutes formal technical support advice or does purchasing their software solution in any way send us a kickback.