I’ve never got round to checking out Twitter, to my great shame!

I already have profiles on Facebook, Bebo, and other social networking sites – many of which allow a quick method of updating your status. So why bother with Twitter now?

• Update by mobile (just need to charge my mobile now )
• Easy integration into my blog

Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t seem to want to check any of my email addresses for friends at the moment, so I am following: no-one. And I am being followed by: no-one.

You can rectify this by coming to see me at http://twitter.com/johnmcc!

While it will take a long time for the full implications of the Viacom vs. Youtube battle to be known, one thing has already become clear – user privacy is an extremely low priority.

The great fear, of course, is that users are held responsible for having viewed copyrighted content, wittingly or unwittingly.

Yes, I said unwittingly!

You may or may not know this, but many modern applications prefetch links. They’re smart enough to know what link you’re likely to follow next, and they queue it up for you, in advance. This speeds up your browsing experience quite dramatically!

It affects your privacy too though, since the act of prefetching registers that you’ve loaded a particular page, even with no action on your behalf. From Mozilla:

“Privacy implications

Along with the referral and URL-following implications already mentioned above, prefetching will generally cause the cookies of the prefetched site to be accessed. (For example, if you google amazon, the google results page will prefetch www.amazon.com, causing amazon cookies to be sent back and forth.”

(http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Link_prefetching_FAQ)

I know of at least two applications that prefetch links – Firefox and Stumbleupon. You can check your settings quite easily.

• Open a new browser window
• Type about:config in the address bar
• In the ‘Filter’ box, type ‘prefetch’. You might see several settings.

Network.prefetch-next is Firefox’s setting for prefetching links; double-click this to toggle it from on to off, if you like.

If you want to adjust Stumbleupon’s settings for prefetching links, it is easiest to do this through the SU toolbar thusly:

Tools->Toolbar Options->Configuration->Prefetch Stumbles (makes stumbling faster)

So will I be changing my settings? Probably not. I don’t honestly believe that my youtube viewing habits will get me into trouble. However, knowledge is good; and you should know that the prefetching options that speed up your browsing comes with a cost to your privacy.

Along with roughly 7,999,999 others, I eagerly downloaded Firefox 3 on release day. Not long after, my stumbleupon toolbar was upgraded to 3.23. Let’s have a look at the changelog:

• Adds tag search via the Firefox 3 url bar.
• Adds bookmark integration in Firefox 3.
• Delivers Send-to pages more swiftly.
• Notifies of waiting sent pages via a more easily noticeable button
• Improves browser responsiveness upon login for users with many Friends.
• Adds tutorial information bubbles for novice users.
• Fixes a bug that could cause the sent page counts on the Send-to menu to stop incrementing if you send several pages in succession.

Cool, seems like it’s all good. Wait, what’s that second one again?

• Adds bookmark integration in Firefox 3.

OK, seems innocuous enough. So I’m stumbling happily along, when I suddenly notice that my bookmarks folder looks like this:

Yep, Stumbleupon is now bookmarking every time I hit the thumbs up! This seems a bit superfluous to me; just because I like a page or want to add a pic to my SU blog, it doesn’t mean I want to bookmark it!

Turns out it’s easy to turn off – Tools -> Toolbar Options -> Search and Tagging -> Save Favorites To Firefox Bookmarks Folder.

OK, I know that this is supposed to be a social bookmaring app, but I can’t help but be a little surprised that this is the default behaviour now!

Does anyone out there appreciate this new feature? Am I just being cantankerous again?