Webifying your life
Categories: Professional, Technology trendsSo to no big surprise I’ve started using Twitter. This, in addition to facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and my blog… and yes, I do have a mySpace, Friendster and Hi5 account as well. Here’s my take on this social media stuff, the difference between them and whether they matter.
Finding purpose with each media
A colleague asks me: “Why do I need Twitter for? I got the status field in Facebook doing the same thing!” True, to a certain extent.
It’s the usage! The technology is fairly similar for each media: publishing text, pictures, web references and connect with other members. But the members use them slightly different, finding some purpose with each media. Here’s my interpretation:
- Twitter: allows users to broadcast small messages, similar to facebook status fields. The difference? I see no point in limiting who reads my twits. I keep the twits to statements, ideas or things I find funny and avoid writing too much personal stuff… some of it might even be useful to anyone caring to read it!
- LinkedIn: Allows users to write up their resume, connect with colleagues and potential employees, and discuss business-related issues. A great tool for headhunters and background searching on people. And yes, I’ve received some job offers through linkedIn as well.
- Facebook: Connect with your “friends”! Seriously, FB is not as much about connecting but more about sharing. Tell or display something you’d like to share and check out what other friends are sharing. Get invites to stuff that happens and a great way to keep somewhat in touch with friends overseas.
- Plaxo: a somewhat mix of FB and LinkedIn.
- mySpace: Used to be the pioneer but is now more or less a giant place for underground band trying to make it. I lost interest a while back ago and all my music browsing happens through iLike (music) on FB, last.fm or Spotify.
- Friendster, Hi5… dead to me. Has no value passed FB.
So what about connecting all these sites into one, wouldn’t that be great? They do more or less the same thing? not to me. I don’t want my boss on Facebook, I see no purpose in connecting with friends on LinkedIn and too much personal stuff on Twitter serves no purpose to people following me but doesn’t know me.
So each media can serve a different purpose, if the user finds it valuable. If not, forget about webifying your life… except….
Facebook matters because it has a critical mass of users. A majority of your friends are using facebook and if you’re not you’re most likely out of the loop or the last one to get updated.
Facebook was originally a digital student yearbook at Harvard (beautiful school, almost as cool as MIT), with a business case of easily distributing fb to other campuses for money. It ended up as a massive friends-connection-sharing web site. About 25% of the Norwegian population is now on FB! In other words, FB has passed way beyond the critical mass of social media. But stay away from FB if you’re afraid of “friendly fire” (friends tagging humiliating pictures/videos of you and broadcasting it throughout FB).
Twitter matters because it’s a great way of broadcasting information fast - on the spot. And you will most likely not find that information using Google!
Most of this information is of course not very useful, but you can quickly get up to date on news happening at the moment, help on issues or latest celebrity gossip… from the celebrities themselves. And seriously…. all that information, making Google a poor tool for searching twitter information… suddenly the giant search engine shows its weakness.
Protecting your privacy or making your life transparent? Yes, both please.
True, we’re afraid of both: we want total control of our own information yet we’re dying to be noticed by everone else. Webifying allows you to do this to a certain extent. I try to manage this in the following way:
- Don’t broadcast information that might come back at you in a harmful way. Don’t talk bad about people on twitter, don’t show remorse or complain about life on facebook. “Fringe” friends (or friends you wouldn’t talk to except through FB) will base their total impression of you through how they perceive your sharings. Make sure it’s positive or something you can stand for as a person.
- Facebook is NOT your real life! It’s an image you create for others. It can be as real or fake as you want it. Just as real as your FB friends are
- LinkedIn is the best source to tell who you REALLY are. If you’re a real LinkedIn person you have your resume, recommendations and background open for everyone to see. Basically it tells what you have done with your life. If you’re on LinkedIn, do it for real! Make sure your resume looks stunningly good and recommendations makes you look like superman. And your status field is something interesting.
- Keep your real friends closer. No, FB will never replace your interaction with real friends but it can enhance it. I would never give up face-to-face communication for status browsing or wall writing.
- Don’t be afraid of simple connecting with your web friends, by giving them a comment or “like” their sharing. You might end up with a good impression and bringing someone closer to your life.
- Cut off, block or simply “don’t show updates” on people you don’t want to waste time on. Life’s too short, and there are too many people on the web, to follow every update. If someone you don’t care about becomes a pain, cut him/her off. You’re not gonna meet that person anyway, right?
Webify your life the way you want it to be - but better keep real personal stuff to yourself. Real life friends are a lot better support than a “poor you” message on FB.
So who am I to talk about this stuff?
Technology is my career: the business impact is my job and the social impact is my interest.
April 20th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Interesting post, but I feel you underestimate parts of what this is all about.
Especially I think you underplay the advances the simplicity of twitter has brought about. Twitter is much more than publishing information. For many people it’s a valuable conversation, and I currently get as much out of it as I get from real life conversations. I have a virtually unlimited network of skilled people I can use as a resource to bounce ideas off on, answer my questions in real time etc. Some of the relationships I build there are as real to me as with people I meat face-to-face.
And by the way, Twitter is googleable. If you for instance google for “pairwithus tormaroe” you’ll currently get four hits, all of them displaying twitter posts made by me.
Social media has really started to take off the last couple of years, particularly thanks to facebook. This is the first step to effective crowd sourcing, which are changing the way we interact, work and collaborate.
I think what you are saying about how people will perceive you online is very important though. What you publish will persist, and you will have to answer for it at your next job interview. Our offline and online personalities are merging, and if you will not be proud of what you put online a year from now, you must restrain from putting it online now.
I think the emerging generation of online users will have a much more organic approach to this. It will become a natural thing to have a more “public private life”, and I think this will raise the acceptance of differences and opinions in the world at large, which is a good thing.
April 20th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Excellent reply, T. With a good set of follow-up clues.
Social media and real life: Thank your for clearing my point on this issue. What you post on the web persist, which can be potentially dangerous to you. Not only in terms of a future employee…
Online collaboration: Extremely good point. The ability to share valuable knowledge across the world is a somewhat untapped potential to innovation. I’d like to write a follow-up on that. Open Source is a good example of the “innovators” of online collaboration.
Twitter and communication: yes, I agree. Person to person communication is very valuable. Yet, the possibility of spreading your word to anyone with similar interests by adding a hash in your comment is extremely powerful!
Twitter and Google: I agree to a certain extent… Twitter is, technically, searchable through google. However, given Twitters nature of on-the-spot information or the amount of small text messages, google becomes a poor tool to search information posted on twitter. I bet if you’re not very familiar with twitter and base your entire search on google, you will not be able to dig into the massive quantity of information residing on Twitter. Twitter search therefore becomes a powerful complement to google.
April 20th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Twitter and Google: I agree. I view Twitter as the first information step, meaning that the information don’t exists anywhere else you will find the twitter information about it through Google, and if it exists elsewhere, you probably want the “elsewhere”.
I’m hoping that the twitter format don’t make us stop writing full articles about stuff, summarizing the knowledge we gain through our conversations. To some extent, twitter has silenced a lot of blogs, but that is probably blogs that don’t deserve to live - and makes the content in blogs better over all.