In his new autobiography Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob Lowe explains fame from the famous person’s point of view. It’s something I’d never considered before, and yet it makes blinding sense. In this case, the reference is to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Lowe once praised the film to Coppola, who replied

You know, Rob, to me The Godfather is like that lamp, he says, pointing. It exists. It’s right there. People have opinions about it. The real Godfather, for me, is the experience I had making it.

It took Lowe years, he says, to fully comprehend the remark. Here’s his explanation:

“If you are fortunate enough to be part of a hit, particularly a transcendent one, all emotional ownership [of it] is transferred from you to the audience. They judge it and embrace it; project their own hopes, dreams and fears onto it; take their personal meaning from its themes, and with these investments it becomes theirs. The significance of your participation pales in comparison to the significance the project has on their imaginations. And so, you are left outside of the phenomenon. Just as Paul McCartney can never experience The Beatles, Francis Ford Coppola can never experience The Godfather. It becomes a lamp.”

The book, by the way, has loads of dishy tales about Lowe’s family, friends and films. It’s a quick, entertaining and occasionally illuminating read.

Another panicky status meme is making the Facebook rounds. And while there’s a grain of truth buried in it – as there is with many memes – it’s surrounded by some scare-mongering misinformation.

The current status meme reads something like this:

ATTENTION: This Friday, Facebook will become owner of the publishing rights of ALL your private photos. You need to make a simple change: go to ‘account’, ‘account settings’, ‘facebook adverts’(along the top), ‘ads shown by third parties’, choose ‘NO ONE’ then SAVE. Takes seconds to fix. And please share share share. (for those who haven’t done this yet..)

That right there is two completely separate issues rolled into one. Let’s take them one at a time.

First: Facebook doesn’t “own” your private photos. In fact, section 2 of their Terms (have you ever read them? you might want to) explicitly states “You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook” (emphasis mine). They further state on their Facebook Ads Settings page, “Despite what you may have heard, Facebook does not give your personal information to advertisers—including your name, profile picture or any of your photos.”

According to those same terms, when you upload your photos or other intellectual property, y ou give Facebook a “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post… this license ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

Why the non-exclusive license? So that they have the right to a) have your content on their servers and b) serve it to others, in accordance with your privacy preferences.

That brings us to part 2. Yes, Facebook is now (and has been) integrating their content into third party websites, and doing something they call “social advertising” on Facebook itself. That’s when they show you, in your sidebar, that such-and-such friend of yours “Liked” a given page or product, for example.  If that sort of thing wigs you out – as it does me – you can visit the Facebook Ads settings page, click on both Edit Third Party Ad Settings and Edit Social Ads settings and make sure you select “No One” for each of them.

My long-held opinion and personal preference is that the default sharing settings should always be the most private. Users should have to affirmatively opt-in to more public levels of sharing of their data and IP. However, since Facebook is provided free to users, it needs to make money in other ways, such as through advertising. They sell ads by mining our data, and our content (if we let them). So be it. We’re always free to choose not to use it, after all.

And while I’m no Facebook apologist, repeating erroneous information like “Facebook will own all your photos on Friday!” obscures the real message, which is: It’s a good idea, and your responsibility, to regularly review all of your Facebook privacy settings and make sure they’re how you want them to be.

This isn’t a commercial or paid endorsement, but it’s going to read like one. Rest assured I’m merely a happy long-term customer.

Worried about your email address being exposed to spammers after last weekend’s Epsilon breach? Fed up with the spam you already get? Read on.

I intentionally use separate email addresses for various purposes (one for newsletter subscriptions, one for online shopping, etc.). But I’ve used the same primary email address since 1999. No surprise, then, that at one point I was getting 600+ spam emails every day.

That was (barely) manageable on my desktop mail client with the junk filter activated, but once I got a smartphone in 2004, game over. (Ever try deleting 600 emails on a Treo, making sure NOT to delete the ones you want to read or save? Ouch.)

Drowning in email, I turned to a web-based service called SpamArrest. After configuring it and leaving it to churn through my inbox overnight – I usually leave email on the server for 10 days after reading – the result was BLISS. Virtually no spam.

SpamArrest operates based on a whitelist. Upload your address book and everyone in it is considered pre-approved. Get email from newsletters, schools or online stores? You can pre-approve entire domains. Send an email, and the recipients are automatically added to your whitelist. Anyone NOT approved is given a Captcha challenge (you can customize the accompanying text) to prove that they’re human and not a bot. You can also permanently block given emails or domains.

Known spam is stopped before it ever gets to you. If SpamArrest isn’t sure whether a given email is spam or not, it pops it into an “Unverified” folder and keeps it for a week for you to examine at your leisure. By default it will consider anything coming from your own email address to be unverified (since many spammers spoof their recipients’ emails as the senders’), unless you direct it otherwise.

You can even read and send email from the SpamArrest website if you wish (helpful when you’re away from your own computer/device).

SpamArrest isn’t free – prices start at $3.75/month – but more than pays for itself, IMO, in savings of time and aggravation. It does, however, offer a 30-day free trial if you want to try before you buy. (Disclosure: that’s an affiliate link, and I’ll get a credit if you end up subscribing. If you’d prefer to navigate directly to www.spamarrest.com without using my link, the same free trial awaits you.)

Even if you use SpamArrest or a similar provider, email may make its way into your inbox because it appears to be from a company (Chase, CitiBank, Target, TiVo) with which you’ve done business. Keep in mind:

• These companies will never ask you to provide or “reconfirm” sensitive information via email. Don’t fall for it.
• If you want to make sure that you’re providing your information to the right website, type in the URL yourself (as opposed to clicking on it in an email) and make sure you’re on a secure (https) page.
• One way to check the links in an email is to hover over them. If the URL displayed is different than what’s represented in the text, do not click.

When in doubt, contact the company yourself by telephone or email.

Be careful out there!

Herewith my links of interest for March 29, 2011:

• Mashable gathers ten of the most extraordinary Tweets ever, from the very first one (by co-founder Jack Dorsey) to a marriage proposal to the infamous 2008 single-word tweet “Arrested” that arguably first brought Twitter to the mainstream media’s attention.
• Many people choose to follow a vegetarian/vegan diet for political reasons (animal cruelty, big-business farming). But the best reason might be the one uncovered by the The China Study. This multi-year research undertaken by Oxford and Cornell found, quite simply, that people who eat a plant food diet and avoid animal proteins and fats will minimize and/or reverse the development of chronic diseases. Sound good to you?
• This Skittles commercial is either really clever or really bizarre. Maybe both, actually.
• Del Harvey, the leader of Twitter’s trust and safety team posted a brilliant, succinct piece on the importance of using strong passwords, and using different passwords for different sites. Too much trouble? Probably not as much trouble as getting your online banking or email hacked. And those Facebook memes that have you put your birthplace as your status? That’s a no.
• The most interesting thing to come out of SXSWi, as far as I’m concerned: Hashable’s info-packed infographic on the who, what, when and where of people connecting during the show.
• Enrique Iglesias is going on tour with Britney Spears this summer. Oh wait, no he’s not.

If you don’t use (and don’t plan to use) MobileMe to sync your calendars, move along. Nothing to see here. If you use a me.com address as your primary email, you can also move along.

If, however, like me you don’t use a me.com address as your primary email, know this before upgrading to the new MobileMe calendar (which you’ll need to do by May 5 if you want to keep syncing calendars between devices):

• You won’t be able to use iCal to edit events you created in iCal prior to the upgrade. You’ll only be able to edit them on the MobileMe site.
  • You WILL be able to edit events you create in iCal after the upgrade. Just not the ones you’d made previous to the upgrade.
• Invitations for events you create in iCal after you upgrade will come from your me.com address. There is no option, currently, to have them come from an external (i.e. non me.com) address. So if you send meeting invites, the invitations will come from, and the responses will go to, your me.com address.

Here are my specific issues with the above:

1. No forewarning from Apple that this might be an issue during the upgrade. It took 90 minutes on the phone , including escalation to a senior MobileMe advisor, to figure out why I was unable to edit events in iCal after the upgrade.
2. No ability to give edit rights on a shared calendar to a non-MobileMe address (which would, in theory, resolve the edit issue above). Calendars can be shared with non-MobileMe addresses, but only on a read-only basis.
3. No option to have calendar invites come from a non-MobileMe address going forward. This is not ideal for those of us who want work-related meeting invitations to come from our work email addresses, or who prefer to keep our me.com addresses private.

These things aren’t the end of the world, but they are irritating, particularly for a service for which Apple charges $100 per annum. If they irritate you as much as they irritate me, please join me in making your feelings known to Apple. If enough people have these issues, perhaps they’ll be persuaded to make some changes going forward.

Have you encountered these or other issues with the MobileMe upgrade? Let me know in the comments.

I wanted to like Hashable. At first it seemed useful to me: you can use it to document the people you meet, and to introduce others. It’s like Foursquare or Whrrl, except for checking in with people instead of into places. As it describes itself: “Every time you connect with someone – like having breakfast, drinks, or just running into a friend on the street – you can save it on Hashable — and build your true network along the way.”

But something about it rubs me the wrong way. A few things do, actually. For everything it does for you, there’s a price. Not in actual dollars and cents, perhaps, but in privacy and in business intelligence.

Introductions. Hashable lets you “introduce” two people you think should meet, and then track their interactions afterwards. Honestly: when have you needed a third-party service or app to introduce two people you think should meet? You can email them, tweet them, Facebook them. Or call them, or make sure they meet up at a conference or event you’re all attending.

But, Hashable would say, we present a snapshot profile of them to each other for you, thereby making it easier for the people you’re introducing to find out about each other. Perhaps. But it’s nothing that a quick Google or LinkedIn search can’t do. And it can’t replace the context or reason for which you’re making the introduction, which presumably you’d have to provide manually anyway.

Privacy. Do you really want a public record of everyone you’re communicating with, and when, and where? Have you no concerns about others knowing the companies or clients with whom you’re meeting, or the events you are (or aren’t) attending? Fine, Hashable says, keep the updates private. In that case, what’s the point? So you can look back and see who you met with? Can’t you do that via your own calendar, or Things, or Evernote? Why do you need to give a third party app/service that info? And if you’re only making some of your interactions public, isn’t that defeating the point of having connections see what you’re doing?

Well, you might argue, anyone could look on LinkedIn or Facebook or my Twitter feed and see who I know. Sure. But that’s different than knowing that you’ve met with them at a specific time or place. If you’re meeting with prospective clients or vendors or employers, you might prefer to keep that information discreet.

Commonsense. I work with a surprisingly large number of people I never see face to face. Our interactions happen over email, phone or online. Am I supposed to note it in Hashable every time I send an email or have a conference call?

Analysis. Hashable analyzes your connections and tells you who you interact with the most. Do you need a website to tell you that?

Convenience. Hashable says it gives you a unified online address book – everyone you know from Twitter, Facebook, webmail, etc. all in one place. Perhaps this could be useful. But I feel uneasy about giving Hashable (or anyone) access to my complete address book.

Endgame. What, exactly, is Hashable going to do with this goldmine of business information? What’s its business model? No one seems to know, and Hashable isn’t saying. In the meantime, I’m amazed at the number of seemingly savvy people who are happily handing over the keys to their contact kingdom.

Tired of your inbox being flooded with Quora new follow notifications? Here’s how to stop ‘em.

Login at Quora.com. Click on “Settings” in the upper-right nav bar.

On the Settings page, look for the section on the left called “Email Settings.” Expand each area by clicking on the blue “view settings” link next to it, and uncheck everything for which you don’t want to be emailed. (There are lots of boxes to uncheck, needless to say.) Make sure you click Save when done.

All of the auto-follows aren’t a best practice, needless to say; nor is the automatic population of email notifications. Both should require affirmative user consent. But unless and until Quora rights those wrongs, this should help stem the tide.

Of course, you could also just delete your Quora account altogether… I haven’t taken that step yet, myself, but may get there soon.

If you’re an artist/performer building up your Facebook presence via a personal Facebook account, you should almost certainly be doing so via a Facebook “Page” instead.

8 Reasons You Need a “Page”

1) No Limits. Facebook currently limits personal accounts to 5,000 “friends.” Pages have no limits.

Don't let this be you!

2) Analytics. Facebook provides demographic data to Page administrators about those who have “Liked” the Page, including age, gender, country and city, language, and interactions (posts, video/audio plays, etc.). This is valuable information, and you can’t get it from your personal Facebook account.

Example of Facebook Page demographic analytics

3) Outreach – Updates. You can send Updates to followers (or “Likers,” if you like) of your Page. You can target Updates by demography – just women, or just senior citizens, or just Californians… making sure your message goes only to those most likely to see and act on it. Or you can just blast all of your followers.

4) Outreach – Ads. You know those ads you see in the right sidebar when you’re on Facebook? You can promote your Page – or a specific event or even a link outside of Facebook – via a Facebook Ad. Like Updates, you can target the ads demographically, geographically, etc. You can buy the ads via cost-per-click or cost-per-impression, and you set a daily maximum budget. If you’re promoting a concert, new release, television appearance, etc., this can be extremely useful.

5) Administration. You can add administrators to your Facebook Page, who can help you maintain it by posting photos, answering questions, etc. Any posts/uploads will appear to come from the Page’s profile, as opposed to the personal account of whoever’s doing the updating. This can be a tremendous help, particularly if you generate lots of links, photos, or news, or if you’re in a band with several members and more than one of you wants to make updates. It can also help to have someone else watch out for spam or abusive posts and delete/report them.

6) Page customization. You can customize your Facebook Page with tabs to highlight events, contests, new releases, your Twitter feed. You can even drop a store right into your Page (see below). You can’t do that with a personal page.

Example of Facebook Page customization - The Daylights' store

7) Privacy. This may be the best reason of all. Having a Page that’s distinct from your personal Facebook account lets you keep the two separate. People who “Like” your Page won’t be able to see that you’re the Page admin or have any access to your personal account. So you can post photos of your kids on your personal page, and interact with your friends and family, without having all your fans privy to it.

8) Custom URL. Just as with personal accounts, Facebook pages can have custom URLs (e.g. www.facebook.com/curtsmithofficial). Grab your professional name before someone else does. Note: If someone has already taken your professional name, and that name is copyrighted, you can report it to Facebook here and request to have it transferred to your page.

Are there downsides? A few, possibly.

1) Transitioning. If you’ve built up quite a following on your personal account, it can take some nudging to get them to “Like” your Page and refer to that instead of your personal account. There might also be some bruised egos who feel they’ve been “demoted” if they don’t get to be “Friends” with you anymore. That being said, the sooner you establish your Page, the fewer feathers you’re likely to ruffle.

2) Restricted. You and your Admin(s) can respond to posts and comments on your own Page as “you,” but if you post on someone else’s page, it will show up as being made from your personal account. In other words, you can’t post as your Page on another account’s Wall. So if you want to keep your personal account private, you’ll need to restrict your interactions with fans to your Page only.

3) Security. Adding Admins to your page enables them to post as you. Presumably you’d only make someone you trust implicitly an Admin, and in this sense it’s no different than having a webmaster, but it’s something to mention for those who might be concerned.

Ready to start your Page?

Click here to go to Facebook’s “Create A Page” screen.

Questions or comments? Please leave them below.

Found on Twitter via @meganberry, @adamstober and @joefernandez.

View the original at flowingdata.com.

Photo by Adam Selwood

Without wishing to overly alarm those of you (or whose kids) use FourSquare or similar services, here’s a real-life example of what I cautioned about in my Gee-Oh!-Location post last September.

In the blog linked below, the author describes how she was stalked by a stranger to a restaurant where she’d checked in via FourSquare.

shea sylvia [blog edition] – A Cautionary Tale.

I have friends who work for geolocation services, who may wish to argue that this sort of thing is a bad apple that shouldn’t spoil the bunch. I understand the benefits of establishing win-win relationships with retailers one favors. I even understand (sort of) the gameplay aspects.

But if you must “check in,” make sure you do so privately to your friends also on the service, not to the general public. Because surely, the benefits of doing so publicly don’t outweigh the all-too-real risks.

Related: Think Twice Before You Post That

Thanks to ProducerGirl, whose original tweet about Shea Sylvia’s blog brought it to my attention.