Posts tagged linkedin
by Ben Lopez
The problem with social media these days is that we’re constantly being pushed to make everything connected, and encouraged to share exactly what we’re doing, buying, and where we are. What does this equate to? NOISE, and lots of it.
Perhaps you read somewhere in one of those dime-a-dozen SEO e-books that maximum exposure is critical. Well, not when you’re scaring off users from your website and social media accounts, readers from your blog, and potential customers for your business with information overload. You wouldn’t call someone 10 or 20 times a day to tell them you’re playing a game, would you? Of course not, that’s just not socially acceptable. When you post things online, think of it as a real life conversation, and remember this when considering how often you want to inform people of every minute detail.
It’s inefficient for all of us; the chronic poster loses subscribers, friend interactions, and it is more difficult to keep track of their own activities due to the very clutter they themselves create. For the rest of us, it clutters our friend feeds, RSS feeds, and inboxes like nobody’s business, good grief. Same concept as people that forward a dozen or more e-mails a day. You’re my friend, and I still like you as a person, but at the end of the day it’s just bothersome to delete all those e-mails. In the same way, it’s bothersome unsubbing/unfriending, hiding individual apps, and tweaking my display settings due to the pseudo spam of others.
My advice: DO NOT LINK TWITTER to your Facebook, LinkedIn, or Myspace account, or else we’re all doomed to suffer endless pages of “LOL yea i no” and “help me tend my crops in Farmville!”. Assuming you don’t post a new article every hour, auto updates from your blog are generally considered acceptable. If you play games, get rid of the ridiculous number of updates that flood both your wall and our friend streams.
Follow these simply rules and it’s entirely possible our planet may not be doomed (maybe). What do you think? Is there still a chance of redemption, or is society beyond hope?
by Ben Lopez
This is it. After months of hype, today is the day where Facebook users near and far, in every corner of the world, are being asked to delete their accounts in protest. It’s not just Facebook’s policies that have come under scrutiny, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal actions as well. I could have shared a news article every day on a new piece of incriminating evidence against the company. And it is bad. The press on Facebook since the F8 conference has been almost universally negative.
If you’re looking for somewhere else to go, there’s always Myspace, who has detailed in this interview with Mashable, some of the major changes they’ll be undergoing throughout the summer and into the fall. Many of their features, such as the ability to filter your friend feed by category (status update, photos, videos, etc) has already been put into place, and are actually quite useful. If it’s been a while since you’ve logged-in, take a look around and I think you’ll be surprised.
Another hopeful is Diaspora (die-ASS-pore-a), an open source solution that will have a large emphasis on privacy. Unfortunately, development is still early, and no UI (user-interface) or concrete details have yet been revealed. However, some tech insiders, such as Leo Laporte (host of This Week In Tech), sees great potential in it, and has personally donated money to their Kickstarter campaign (as have I). I’ll be keeping my eye on them, and will report any details as they become available.
For those of you who aren’t ready or willing to quit, but are still fed-up with the way Facebook has handled your privacy, there’s another way to send a message to FB: Facebook Protest’s D-Day.
Am I quitting Facebook? Halfway. I’m deleting my secondary account. I do use it as a business platform, but I would eventually like to quit, yes. Did you end up quitting? Share your comments and questions below!
