Now I agree with Craig, Matt, and my friend about the need to put the phone away and enjoy life the old fashioned way. My blackberry stays in my golf bag most rounds since I don’t often smoke a three wood 230+ yards to six feet. And my phone stays in my pocket during dinners. I like to “check in” to restaurants on foursquare before I walk in the door. I also understand that many people will never twitter about their golf exploits or check into restaurants via foursquare. Not everyone wants to “life stream” like I do. But a lot of people do. Extroversion on the web is a growing phenomenon. I see it with my kids who were trained in social media by Facebook and they were reluctant to embrace public social media like blogs, twitter, and the like. But they are coming around and public sharing of information is becoming much more accepted in their generation. That is great news for Facebook as they try to move the default information sharing mode in their service to public. I bet they’ll be reasonably successful with that. And there is something about the mobile web that leads to more of this behavior. I’ve been playing golf for almost 35 years. I’ve had my share of great shots and most of them have been witnessed by a couple of friends at best. Yesterday, I shared the news with almost 30,000 people. Most probably couldn’t care less. But I know that some of my followers do. I am sure my friend Steven Johnson smiled when he saw that tweet.

Giving the user an option to guess the name of a pet in lieu of actually knowing a password is just dramatically shortening the odds for the attacker. The service is essentially telling the attacker: “we understand that guessing passwords is hard, so let us help you narrow it down from potentially millions of combinations to around a dozen, or even better, if you know how to Google, just one”. The problem is not the concept of having an additional authorization token, such as mothers maiden name, that can be used to authenticate in addition to a password, the problem arises when it is relied on alone, when the answer is stored in the clear in account settings, and when users end up using the same question and answer combination on all of their accounts.