Flavors.me is a beautiful and highly usable way to set up your personal page

I was just checking out this website, flavors.me, and it is one of the coolest, sexiest places to host and design your personal information page. The design here is truly phenomenal. Simple, one-step sign-up and a clean interface provide an experience that is clear and straightforward while allowing for a lot of customization. Speaking of customization, if you want to add an even more unique look beyond what is available in the free version, you can upgrade to their premium service for just $20/year. It includes more fonts, SEO metadata, the ability to re-route from a custom domain, analytics and more.

Get the whole scoop in the following video.

Are you alive? PassMyWill Entails Your Social Identity to Your Friends

Know someone who died recently from your friends list on Facebook? Having a dead person in your friends list can be odd when you still see their automatic postings from various QOTD, Astrology and Reader Apps that make it appear as though they are living. Sure, you could remove them but, somehow, it seems wrong to toss a life away into forgetfulness through the, usually passive-agressive, method of removing "friends." They died, its probably not their fault.

PassMyWill is a service that will monitor your social activity. If you don't post anything, it will try to contact you via email. If that fails, it will send a list of logon credentials (that you put together ahead of time) to a list of people of your choosing. The idea is that you trust those individuals enough to do something nice with, your now ironic, social media presence. Perhaps a memorialization or, if your the joking type, some kind of silly, from the dead, social networking. 

It is a decent idea, but not without some concerns. I don't think this can actually differentiate from automatic app posts and real human posts. Security is another concern. Your friends will need a security key to access the passwords once you pass away. However, many are still uncertain about whether the system is easily tricked into distributing your passwords unintentionally.

Furthermore, there are easier and more sensible ways to accomplish this task. Unless you are a sad and pathetic internet troll who has no friends and has been shunned by all family, you will likely be able to include something in your will, or your security deposit box at the bank, that someone you care about will be able to access. If you haven't thought of that in this day and age it might be time to formulate some kind of plan. If you are like me, your partner should know how to access your social accounts (unless you are a sneaky sneak with things to hide). If you don't have someone close to you, include it in your will to have your accounts deleted by the executor. Just be sure to update it whenever you change your passwords.

Read More: TechCrunch - PassMyWill is a will for your online assets and passwords

Own a shop? Keep up on your online presence or be closed!

Apparently, there is a new tactic being used by some very shrewd and seedy business owners. In the hopes of stealing customers from a successful competitor, some shop owners have been going on to Google Places and flagging their competition as "Closed." It seems that Google has almost no vetting process for these flags (which just makes them switches). Because of that, some shops have been packed one day and empty the next as some guy at the place across the street decided that his biggest competition is now closed. So, until Google figures out how to begin managing this, it would behoove anyone with a presence on Google Places to keep up on their business profiles.

Just another example of why you should always remain aware of what is going on with your entire online presence. You never what might have gone wrong whether by some technical error or malicious intent.

Check it out: NYT - Closed, Says Google, but Shops’ Signs Say Open

Social Nets at Full Tilt: Not really what we thought it'd be

Some people remember when Facebook and Twitter were new and interesting things. Now, 'everybody' is on and the networks are operating at full potential with everyone you know and don't know sharing their lives and thoughts on the networks.

Good, right? Well, not so fast. Yes, almost everyone you could possibly want to friend or follow is out there and is sharing. However, how much noise do you see in your Twitter and FB feeds. It is rather overwhelming, and it should be. The data and information of even your truncated social landscape is more than a person with a full-time job can handle. Like in real life, we have to form task or topic oriented communities to help us focus on the social activities that mean something to us. Unfortunately, we haven't seen this behavior truly take off, but it looks like the networks, with Google+ at the lead, are moving in the direction of making your communities/circles/committees/lunch groups easier to parse out of the noise.

Will social networking lose its wild west, share all, see all ways in favor of neatly controlled cliques and groups where all members see the activity that only they care about? Will (real)friendless basement-dwellers be echoing into a social metropolis with all its shops opened to members only?

The Social Network Paradox | TechCrunch:

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