I’ve been playing the “social networking” game online for a while now, primarily on linkedin, twitter and facebook. Linkedin has turned out to be quite useful from a work/professional point of view as it has enabled me to connect with people I have worked with in the past and lost contact with. I try to keep it professional and not let much personal and hobby stuff leak onto the site. See my linkedin profile here.
I’ve commented on twitter in a previous post. These little tweets of 140 characters seem to have some usefulness but it has to be carefully managed. Mostly, I follow people that tweet interesting technology or ham radio comments, and I try to do the same in return. I don’t think very many people care to hear about the minutia of my day such as when I leave for work and when I do lunch. You can follow me at www.twitter.com/k0nr , if you’d like.
I had registered on facebook a while ago but pretty much avoided it until recently. I was concerned that my college-aged daughters would accuse me of stalking them. And they did 🙂 Lately, though it is clear that facebook has migrated from being a college kid thing to being a mainstream tool. Heck, even my mom is on facebook now. I use this mostly for family and close friends and try to keep the ham radio stuff from bleeding over there…otherwise I run the risk of all of my family blocking me :-).
I tend to think that facebook has the right formula, since its “status update” is about the same as a tweet from twitter. But facebook also threads status updates and comments from other users and has a more robust set of privacy options. Also, you can share photos and other applications on facebook. You can do some of this with twitter but it seems like more of a pain to do. Facebook does have some annoying advertisements but they are generally tolerable.
Anyway, that’s how I am handling these super whizzy social networking things. How about you?
73, Bob