When I was a kid, there just wasn’t any internet. If you wanted to speak with someone else, you’d had to pick up the phone or just go visit them. Being social was complex because it involved plenty of travel to meet others. And even when the Internet was born, being social was still something that people did in real life, not behind a computer screen. Still, things slowly changed about 15 years ago, when people started to use the Internet for all kinds of fun things. It also helped that proper internet tools became more popular. (And free!) The increased speed and the change from the 33k6 modem to ADSL or Cable also helped a lot. And now, just one generation further, being social is something we do online, with bits and bytes.

But enough history. And no, I won’t explain what social media are because now, you’re reading stuff I wrote on such a social media website. (Yeah, a Hosted WordPress site, but I could have used Blogger or Tumblr too..) This discussion is about the complexity of all those social media, not their history.

Most people will be familiar with both Twitter and Facebook. On Twitter you post a message that you’ve just pooped and on Facebook you post the picture of the result. And if you’re a professional, you might also post it on LinkedIn, if you’ve pooped during office hours. Since you can connect these three together, you will start to build a practical resource with all kinds of personal information about you online. Twitter will be used to send small but important updates about yourself, your company or your products to every subscriber while Facebook is practical to connect with the consumers at home. But if you’re looking for a new job or need to hire or find some experts, you use LinkedIn for your search.

Search? That reminds me. There’s also Google Plus although not many people use it as a social platform. Still, people like it because you can use your Google Plus account to log in many other websites. (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter also support this.) Google also provides email accounts and document management tools, plus plenty of online storage, so it’s a very attractive site to use, even if people still are less social on Google Plus than they are elsewhere.

Yahoo also used to be a great social media center, but the competition with other sites has lessened its influence considerably. Many things that Yahoo offers is also available on other sites. Yahoo also used to be great with their email services until they decided to drop support for email through POP/SMTP, just when Google decided to start increasing their email services. By doing so, Yahoo lost much if it’s influence and never really managed to get some back, although their photo-service Flickr still holds plenty of value. (But here too, the competition becomes murderous.)

Pinterest, for example, can also be used to share photo’s with others, although Pinterest is mostly used to share pictures from others, to promote those people. Basically, it’s a site for fans. DeviantArt is a bigger challenge for Flickr and has a huge amount of graphics. Especially cartoons and CGI next to pictures. But DeviantArt is missing an easy way to connect your other social media to your DeviantArt account.

So Behance is another interesting photo site where you can build your gallery and, more importantly, allow people to contact you and offer you jobs and other career opportunities. It also connects better with other social media and if it was free, it would definitely kill Flickr. Unfortunately, the free version has limitations and the commercial version is a bit expensive if you just want to share a bit of your work. Or maybe you’d prefer Bitpine.

Then again, if you’re into the art of images and photo’s, you might like to try to make some profit by selling merchandise. Cafepress is known for this and allows you to upload pictures and put it on all kinds of things, including the cape for your dog or panties for your girlfriend. There are plenty of other sites that allow simpler merchandise like t-shirts but Cafepress just has a huge collection of things you don’t need but which still look nice with your picture on them.

There are more social media sites, of course. Including sites that will combine all your social media sites into a single reference for all your friends to know where you hang around. About.me will combine your bio, your résumé and all kinds of social media connections. Mine tends to have plenty of connections. Connect.me is also practical to connect with other people and allows you to build up your online reputation. TrustCloud is another medium that links people you know to your account. (Or mine.) Or go to Visify and tell others how active you are online.

An oldie is Reddit which is more like an online forum. However, it has so many users that all discussions go very fast. Vimeo can be used to share videos, just like YouTube. Or use GitHub if you’re a software developer and want to share your code with others. Or Society3 for those who need social media for their marketing strategies. Or, the simples one: FourSquare, where you can tell where you are and where you went.

Well, I’ve mentioned plenty of social media sites and it’s all great to share your personal information with the World and get your 15 minutes of fame. And they all connect to one another, often via ID providers from Google, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and lately also from Adobe. (Although Adobe is mostly using its ID provider to have others connect to the Creative Cloud.) If you’re connected to even a third of these sites, then there’s a lot of information about you online. And this is where it starts to become creepy and dangerous.

First of all, the amount of personal information that people share is huge. The joke I started with that people tell others on Twitter that they’ve just pooped isn’t just a joke. It happens! But when people are on a holiday, they also tend to use Twitter, FourSquare and TwitPic to tell the World where they are. With more information on Facebook, thieves can try to find where those people live and rob those empty homes. They might also check LinkedIn to see if someone might have some interesting stuff at home. For example, a CEO of a company who’s on holiday in Italy is a more interesting target than a teacher visiting his aunt in Almelo. And this is just a few different media that can be abused by others without the need to hack anything.

So beware of your privacy and avoid sharing sensitive information online. Or at least be less interesting than the other online people.

But getting robbed is just one risk. You can protect your home, make sure there’s at least one person there when you’re on holiday. The problem is that all these media are connected to one another. And in general, you have given them permission to combine their information. And systems are as strong as their weakest links.

Take, for example, Facebook. Many websites use your Facebook ID to let you log in to those websites. Thus, if someone hacks your Facebook account, they also have access to those other websites. And if one of those sites has your credit card information, your bank account information or your PayPal information. They might not even need this information to make purchases in your name, simply because those connected sites remember this internally. I checked which all I use that are connected to Facebook and it turns out that I’m connected with over a hundred other websites! I know a few friends of mine have an average of around 40 other sites connected to their Facebook account and it’s easy to increase that number since plenty of sites want to connect to Facebook.

Fortunately, I have created several websites that connect to Facebook so several of those connected apps are actually my own sites. Still, it’s a lot. It means that you have to be aware that anyone who hacks my Facebook account will be able to use these other sites. What they can do on those sites depends on how those other sites have implemented their security. And the same applies with apps connected to Google Plus, Twitter or LinkedIn.

If you use Flickr or Yahoo then you might have connected that account with Facebook or Google Plus. Since Yahoo is used as ID provider for even more websites, you can see a complete chain fall down once your Facebook account is taken over. This makes Yahoo less reliable than the others. With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google you can try to add more security. For example, only copy the ID key from the provider plus the email address and force the user to generate a new password for your site. Thus, if Facebook is hacked, they still need a password for your site.

Which causes another problem. When people have a few dozens of social media accounts, they start having troubles remembering all the passwords. I use an email alias for every site. Websites tend to allow visitors to log in with email address and password so I can use the same password for many sites, because the user email address is different for every site. (I still use different passwords too, though.) Most people just use the same address and password for many sites, though. And that’s a big risk, because if one of the sites is hacked, the hackers will be able to use that information for all the other sites.

The bigger websites do have a proper security. At least, that’s what most people think. However, both Adobe and LinkedIn have had some serious trouble with their user databases and users of both websites have received a notice in the past urging them to change their password immediately, because of the hacks. And these were just the bigger sites who dared to publicly admit they’ve been hacked. Smaller social media sites can be a bigger risk if their security isn’t strong enough. Which is why it’s actually better that they use ID providers from the bigger sites instead of implementing their own systems.

Developers often ignore security, thinking that what they’re making isn’t very interesting for hackers. But I can’t say it often enough and remind people that social media are just chained together. One weak link exposes all.

When you want to build your own social media website then be very aware of the security. Don’t build your own version unless you have an expert in your team. And even then have the code audited by another expert. Since social media chain together, a weak link in this chain will take it all down. Which reminds me of this xkcd comic:

When you create your own ID provider, you’re just adding to the competing standards that already exist. What would make your system better than those others? Your site will be more secure by using an existing provider but if that provider has a weakness, your site will fall too unless you require more information.

My suggestion would be that people should be able to log in using Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn but combine it with some extra security. You know, for example, the IP address from the visitor thus you can remember it. As long as it’s the same as in your history, it’s unlikely that the account is hacked. Once it changes, you should ask for one more extra piece of information like a separate password. The visitor should know this, since he might have had to enter it during registration.

Another option would be by asking the visitor for his mobile phone number during registration so you can send an SMS message as part of the authentication process. Thus, if a user is using a different computer, you can send an SMS with a security code. The user will have to enter that code and then you know you can trust that system. Add it to the list of trusted computers for this user and you can keep the visitor safe. (Microsoft is doing something like this with Windows Live.)

So, a long story just to start a discussion about the best way to secure social media, reminding everyone that there are actually a lot of sites chained together through all of this.