Friday, April 24, 2009

Tagging photos/videos on Facebook: a social minefield

“Noooo! Don’t tag me in pics with my boyfriend. My mom’s on my friend list and she doesn’t approve of our relationship.”

“I removed my tags from your party album. I wore my roommate’s favourite top without asking her and if she finds out she’ll kill me.”

“Why do you have to tag only those photos in which I look fat?”

Tagging — attaching name labels to people’s faces in online albums — is a task fraught with risks. If you tag your friends, you could get reactions like the one above. If you don’t tag them, they’ll think you’re not considerate enough to identify them in your photos. Sigh!

To be fair, I’ve been on the other side too. A friend recently uploaded a video of us dancing and making totally silly comments on her Facebook profile, which she tagged me in. I was mortified, not to mention furious. She couldn’t see what the fuss was about, though fortunately she was understanding enough to remove the video. So one person’s entertainment can unwittingly become another person’s embarrassment.

Maybe there should be some sort of convention for this. Like you let your friends know that instead of wasting time tagging stuff that threaten their social life or self-esteem, you’re just gonna upload the photos/videos and they can tag themselves in the most flattering or appropriate ones. And save the really no-holds-barred stuff for emailing to only those people whom you trust, with the permission of the people involved.

The strange thing is, I thought technology was meant to make our lives less complicated.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Lehman Brothers’ toxic legacy

It seems that when Warren Buffett referred to derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction”, he was being more literal than he intended. The Times of India reports that failed investment bank Lehman Brothers holds a nuclear stockpile of uranium, from a former commodities contract undertaken before it collapsed in September 2008.

The best take on this comes from the New York Post, “It turns out we were looking in the wrong place for weapons of mass destruction…They were not in Iraq. They were in Lehman Brothers’ portfolio.”

It seems Mr. Bush wasted all that time scouring West Asia when all he had to do was hop over to Wall Street and ply some chatty investment bankers with copious amounts of expensive alcohol; the truth would have come out sooner or later.

If Saddam Hussein is still alive, as some speculate, he must be falling off the chair laughing.