ClickEats Blog

Time Slips Away

This question was asked in an NPR radio show a couple of weeks ago and really got me thinking.

The radio show had a couple of callers where the wife said that dad comes home and then hops on the computer.  When one of the sons pleads for dad’s attention, dad says “In a minute.”  An hour later, he emerges, but the son has gone on to something else.

Wow.  I’ve been guilty of this and see that Social Media and the internet really does take time away from the family.

This made me think about the message I’m sending the kids.  That mom & dad are always on the computer and ignores them when they want attention.  Talk about a message you don’t want to send.

At the same time, the urge to shop, get news, send Tweets, update friends on Facebook, etc. is so hard to pull out of.  As a mom with an internet-based company to run and grow, who relies heavily on social media and the internet, this battle for time is especially difficult.

I’m going to try to restrict my time on the computer so I can give the kids quality time, especially around dinnertime.  Will that do the trick?  Don’t know yet, but will be finding out.

How about you?  What do you think and what do you do?

Tony Maroni's Pizza Factoria

Tony Maroni’s Pizza in Factoria is running a cool Beat The Monday Blues special, which is sponsored by ClickEats, MyBuzz, and the Eastside Entrepreneurs Social Network.

If 50 people go to http://mybuzz.us/tm and click the “Retweet” button to retweet this special, then EVERYONE gets a free meatball sandwich on Monday, October 12 from 12pm-2pm.

If you retweet, you get entered into a contest to win a $25 gift card from Tony Maroni’s Factoria.

Please tell others about this special so we can get a free meatball sandwich!

My friend Jonathan Akers recently started a website called Frugalocal.  It’s an inexpensive way to help local businesses increase their exposure over the web by displaying the business’ promotions and also submitting information automatically to various search engines.

I think it’s great he’s started this.  Goes to show it’s never too late to pursue your interests.

A few months ago, my husband received an email from a friend to view pictures of some event.  My husband went to the site and created an account to view the pictures.  The next thing he knows, his entire address book was ’scraped’ and all contacts were sent the exact email he had received from his friend.  He thinks this was initiated from a Facebook application, but wasn’t sure if it was his Facebook address book or some other address book that was scraped.

Welcome to SPAM 2.0

So I wasn’t too surprised to see an article in NY Times Typing In an E-Mail Address, and Giving Up Your Friends’ as Well that describes the author having the same experience.  In the article, the author called out these sites as having scraped and SPAMMED her contacts:

Tagged

Mylife.com

Desktopdating.com

I’m sure there are more.  If you know of others who have done this, please send us a comment so we can add them.

This whole practice is a gray area, but should be covered by the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM) law, as described in the article.

Recommendations

Here are a few recommendations on avoiding this:

1. Don’t supply your username and password from large sites like Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail, to a third party sites.  This can be tough if the third party is actually owned by the larger company.  This is because the large sites allow third parties to use code (APIs) to collect user and account information from them as long as they have the correct username and password.
2. Create separate, different usernames and passwords for sites.  This is like #1, but more specific.
3. Use a password manager.  If remembering usernames and passwords is a problem, you can use these programs to remember them: 1Password, Sxipper, Keychain or Firefox Password Manager.
4. Finally, just be very cautious about getting pre-written email invitations from friends.  If you’re not sure about the email, reply to your friend asking what’s going on.