I'm in my final semester of my final year of J-School, and only now have I got a Professor who actually understands the internet, uses social media and doesn't roll their eyes at the mention of online journalism. This is fantastic for us grads who are going to be coming into a terrible job market, with our profession about to be sunk into oblivion. The downside to this is that like so many tech/social media enthusiasts, he does not understand something that, as a borderline geek, I have always been actuely aware of; most people do not give a shit about most computer/tech matters beyond their Facebook profile. Maybe 3 people out of my class of 30 used Twitter before we were instructed to sign up. I was the only one who used delicious, and one of two people who used RSS. I find that reading too many tech blogs and spending too much time online corrals you into a bubble, making you think that this stuff is going to solve all the social ills of the world. But then you get outside and realize that most people are too busy living their offline lives to care. FOCUS: What social media tools have you adopted. What do you find adds the most value in your life. What do you hate and absolutely refuse to use? What have you tried to use and given up on quickly? Anti-Focus: How do people like Gary Vaynerchuck, Ben Casnocha etc build such huge followings? How does one really understand the "black art" of social media. For me, personally: Twitter - I thought it was pointless at first, but I have found it has added a lot of value for me. I have made connections, driven traffic to my website, even gotten jobs with it. I've been able to develop relationships with people (mostly car enthusiasts) I'd probably never know, everyone from mechanics, classic Porsche restorers, magazine editors and auto execs. Facebook - It was great in Freshman year for talking to girls, now it's less important. And their insistence of "sharing" things really skeezes me out. Delicious - I would seriously pay to use this service. I only subscribe to Tucker and Ryan Holidays feeds, but the amount of incredible, life-enhancing content I have gotten from it cannot be overstated. If you enjoyed a lot of the old RMMB threads, well, this is where the topics came from. Foursquare - Always looked lame as hell. I don't want to broadcast my location either...though I had a great idea for a service like this (but can't code) Google Wave - I can see situations where it might have been useful in the past, but it seems like a complete waste of time. Flickr- Facebook is a better way to share photos.
I have a facebook account, it may get checked once or twice a week because it gives me the heebie-jeebies. This site. I honestly don't look at too much else on the net aside from the obvious ones.
When a new tech comes out, I'm one of the first in line to grab an account and check it out. That being said, I rarely use any of it. Personally, I rarely use Facebook (once every 3-4 weeks, maybe?), and then have only friended my immediate family, and very, very close friends. I can't stand the morons that try and friend anyone and everyone they might have ever met. I had one guy get pissed that I didn't accept his friend request, and I replied "dude, you're NOT my friend... we met once, at the race track, and I could care less about what you're doing." I've used Twitter a couple of times, but really don't give a shit about keeping people updated on what I'm doing. LinkedIn is, by far, the best of these for my professional career. With the work I do, as an independent consultant, I have a rather extensive network, and when I keep it updated, it gets me work, as it keeps me visible with people that I normally wouldn't be. It's also handy for me to keep track of where my friends/colleagues are in their work, etc. For the race team I manage, we use Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube to keep our few fans in tune with what's going on. But I just can't understand how people can spend so much time on Facebook seeing what their "friends" are doing.
When I first signed up for good ol Facebook, I thought it was pretty silly. Well, it still is. But I have several friends that live abroad or across the country and it helps us stay in touch and share photos. I'm very busy and rarely have time to sit on the phone to keep up. The people that are my "friends" are really people I consider friends, I don't accept every damn request. I don't truly like that many people and their "updates" of banal daily thoughts. It is also a beneficial medium for me to keep up with some family members without actually dealing with them sober and in person. Yeah, I am a bad person sometimes.
Oh, absolutely, and as someone who's family lives thousands of miles away, I do the same thing. But I know people who spend a lot of time at work, and then HOURS at home at night, doing nothing but Facebook. That is just not healthy.
I used to use Facebook quite heavily when I travelled. It was an easy way to keep anyone who wanted to know up to speed on where I was and what I was doing. I also used it as file storage for my photos. In the last year or two, though, I've fallen out of using it. I'll check it once per day, just to see if I have any messages, but for the most part I think it's played out. Facebook itself is responsible for this, I think. Gone are the days where it was run tightly with only pertinent information shared. Now, all the "notifications" are for bullshit FB aps or to tell you that "[Friend] just found a lonely cow on their farm! Help [friend] find the cow a home!" Who wants to be notified about this shit? I'd cancel the account, but for two reasons. First, I do want to keep the content (photos and notes), and have thus far been too lazy to transfer it elsewhere. Second, and this is kind of morbid, but I've had some friends and family members die in the half-decade the account's been open. If I close it, I lose access to their profiles. I realize this is a retarded reason to keep hanging around, and that the dead certainly aren't checking out their FB pages, but still. There's a little pang that I would no longer be able to read the memorials or flip through pictures to remind me of the lives that once were. Anyone else have an experience like this?
There is a rant coming, and you people had better be prepared for my vitriol. FUCK SOCIAL MEDIA. Facebook was great when it started as a way to keep in touch with friends from college. Remember how you used to have your class schedule on there? And before the semester started you could check to see if there was a hot girl in your class? Or try to find out the name of that chick in your lit class? It was fantastic and effective. Even when the opened it up further it was ok. And you know, now that my mom is on there it's grown slightly cheesy, but that's not what ruined it. Businesses ruined social media. My company put me in charge of our social media shit about 3-4 months after I started. I'm the youngest person in our marketing department, so I guess the fact that I have an analytical background and was hired to do sales/marketing analysis didn't mean shit to them. Also, the fact that I told them that I thought social media was way overrated, a fad, and was ultimately just a way for businesses to waste time, effort and money since there is no way to monetize it and people resent being marketed to on FB... well that was just ignored. We have over 8,000 fans on Facebook. That sounds good, right? Except it's not. Nearly all of those fans found our site through paid Facebook advertising. Here's an interesting little tidbit. Try a little A/B testing with your Facebook advertising. With one ad, appeal to everyone over the age of 35 in a given area. Your impressions to click ratio will be about 15-1. Now do the same thing with students, and watch it drip down to about 200-1. Why? Because only people who don't know what they're doing click on those ads. Sorry. Diatribe. Anyway, I'd like all your twitterites to try another interesting test. Find a website that lists the top people being followed on twitter. Look at their self-descriptions. They come in the following flavors: Social Media Expert, Social Engineer, Marketing Expert, Online Marketing Expert, Social Marketing Expert, Social Media Marketing Expert. Twitter isn't based on actual usefulness and people, it's based on people who want to grow their followers. So you have people following other people in the hopes that they will get followed back. The large contingent of the community couldn't care LESS about what anyone else is saying, they just want that little number to grow and grow. Every day I have to waste precious minutes on that piece of shit service, talking to nobody. And don't even get me started on enterprise social media. That's why I lost my last job. It was a media company, and my jackass boss decided to put everything he had into three niche social networks. They had thousands and thousands of members, people were communicating, blogging and commenting like never before on the company's old website. It was a success! Oh wait. No it wasn't. It made almost no money and advertisers wanted no part of it. 6 months after he launched it 20% of the company was laid off (ok, ok, that was only 2 people. But that's still 20%...) PS. I'm judged on blog visits. Want to help a guy out? Visit. Wait 20 seconds. Leave. You don't even need (or want) to read: http://knovelblogs.com
I've got a facebook and I go on it probably a couple times a week if I'm bored at work. I relied on it way more in college for pictures and things, but I haven't contributed anything to it myself in a very long time. What annoys me about Facebook is that too many people actually rely on it to communicate back and forth when there's no need. Case in point, I went on last week and had a message from my girlfriend's cousin. She said something to the effect of, "Hey, I think you're on here more than [girlfriend]. Could you tell her to get in touch with me?". I told her that this new invention, dubbed "the telephone," actually allowed you to dial a series of numbers and talk to the other person through the device. Quite extraordinary! I always thought that the Facebook IM thing was too much, but this last incident was downright retarded. Communication is already impersonal enough without having to relay a message through facebook, then through the boyfriend, to get in touch with someone who is more like a sister than a person who happens to have the same grandfather.
Ditto on what Pimptress said about Facebook. I hate to talk on the phone, so the reality is that I will rarely pick up the phone to make a call, but it is really easy to just drop a quick note and get quick and dirty updates on peoples lives without having to sit through all of the mundane details. Which brings me to Twitter, I hated it and the steady stream of consciousness and trivial updates. I really don't care what people are doing minute by minute, and really don't want to share what I am doing minute by minute. It really just isn't that interesting. I see the value of Linkedin, but healthcare is remarkably non-techie so is not the best forum for networking within that industry. As far as message boards, just here (which I only recently started actually posting in) and one other where I have been a member for years and is just an incredibly silly, but fun way to waste time (and get some good music recommendations). I have never heard of delicious, I may need to check it out. I should probably subscribe to some sort of newsfeed to get the latest and greatest in medications, clinical guidelines, newest research, etc. If anybody is in the healthcare business and knows of anything (outside of just the health section of google news), suggestions would be appreciated.
By the way, this is the only twitter feed worth following, in my opinion: <a class="postlink" href="http://twitter.com/Shitmydadsays" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://twitter.com/Shitmydadsays</a>
I'll peruse Facebook and periodically post something on there. I haven't gotten into any of the games on there because they look time-consuming and it doesn't amuse me enough. I don't send a lot of messages or do much else on there. I just like to see what people are chatting about. I have about three posts on twitter that were responses to someone else. I only go to my twitter account every couple of days to catch up on what is happening with a celeb or blog that interests me. I don't subscribe to any feeds, which I think is that the blog entries get sent to you in e-mail or some other method? Meh, if I want to see if a blog has been updated, I just go to that blog. I don't like to be inundated with information that I'm not ready to consume. I like message boards the best - this one, a local mommy one, and another one that has a vaguely similar vibe to this one. It fits my personality the best in terms of internet social interaction. I can drop in on a conversation or just lurk - whatever I feel like at the moment. Plus I like the organization. I know "communities" that develop out of the comment section of a blog - Comics Curmugeon, Passive Aggressive Notes, Dave Barry's blog - but stuff gets confused too easily.
Jesus, this entire thread reminds me of that bit by Mitch Hedburg, "I'm against picketing, but I just don't know how to show it" I'll second delicious, it's a neat way to take a deeper dive into those bloggers you follow who willingly share their delicious bookmarks with their fans. Tucker, Charlie Hoehn and Ryan Holiday are some of the guys I follow that people on here would recognize.
I have a Facebook account, but I liked it much better when you had to have a college email address to join. Now it's just a bunch of high school girls saying how much they love their boyfriend of two weeks and family reprimanding me for my cussing and drinking. I don't play any of the games or take the quizzes so it's starting to die out for me. All the updates any more are people becoming fans of "I hate getting out of the hot shower, it's like then north pole in my house" or other stupid shit like that. Recently most of my statuses have been about how stupid Facebook is. I keep my account because I'm friends with people I went to school with or worked with that I don't live close enough to see on a regular basis. I check Twitter once in a great while to see what some celebrities I follow are up to, but never actually update mine. I've kept my MySpace account open for this reason. An old high school buddy who died 3 years ago still has all three of his accounts on there, his personal page, his drunken page (for blogging when drunk), and his music page. He wrote some really interesting blogs that I like to go back and read once a year or so, and his comments are still on my page. I don't write comments on his page like some people, because I'm aware that he isn't actually logging in to check them. I'm always amazed when I log on to see if I have any messages on there that people still update their pages, I thought MySpace died out long ago.
Facebook - I like facebook because it allows me to see how the skinny 'popular' girls that I went to high school with are now fat and nasty. But otherwise, I think it's good to keep in touch with cousins, and friends that live back home while I live the radio dream in the frozen Prairies. Twitter - Is awesome because of accounts like this and this.
I write about boxing on the internet, and Facebook has helped me immensely. Minus all the superstars of the sport, most fighters use Facebook and it is really easy to get ahold of them for interviews that way. Last year I broke the story on Miguel Cotto fighting Joshua Clottey at the Garden in June on HBO simply by contacting Clottey through FB and then getting his number to do an interview. Today I am interviewing a fighter named Al Seeger who has had a crazy career thanks to getting in touch with him on the site. My articles also reach a broader audience. One thing I noticed is that I have about a 50/50 split on real life friends to boxing contacts. My real life friends hardly ever know what I am talking about when it comes to the boxing stuff, but I usually also post shit like this: [Mexicutioner] loves it when he sets up a crockpot dinner in the morning to be ready when he walks in from work. It's almost like having a wife! But, the bitch won't vacuum. [Mexicutioner] often wonders if the boy from "Indian In The Cupboard" regrets not tossing in a few naked Barbies. That would have spiced things up. [Mexicutioner] is not worried about the world ending in 2012; The Jonas Brothers have been to the year 3000. I usually just think up stupid shit like this and find it funny and post it. It's hilarious how it has worked as an ice breaker at bars when a girl I only know through FB brings up my funny status updates. That sounds incredibly gay but it does the "being funny" work without me having to really do it.
I don't have Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, or anything else. I have two e-mail accounts that I check frequently. I obviously check out this site, pm with some of the folks here as well as some other boards. I also have a blog, well, two of them, and occasionally I get a comment and respond there. So not much in the way of social media. It's not that I'm against it, if it works for you, great. I guess I figure it's just easier to call or e-mail people as the whole social networking thing can backfire, as we've discussed in other threads.
I was never really a big facebook/myspace guy up until a few months ago. I have friends all over the country, and from the different era's in my life. I have friends from when I was growing up, and then two enlistments in the Army. Most of the people that are my fb "friends" are friends of mine in real life, meaning I have their phone numbers, I may not have seen some of them in years, but its nice to see what people are up to. I don't have anything interesting enough to say for a twitter account, so fuck it.
What I dislike about Facebook is how, with certain people, it has turned every social event into a photo-taking event. You can't get drunk and stupid anymore without it appearing on the internet. You can't even grab lunch with your friends without flashes going off. I mean, sure, take a couple of pictures with your friends if you're all dressed up fancy or if you don't see each other a lot, but there's a reasonable limit between that and taking 25 pictures of just having a few beers at the pub.
Yeah, I've had a whole lot of picture of me that I'd rather the world not see end up "tagged". I just untag em, this makes me feel better even though they are still out there. Nothing like getting hammered and hooking up with a relatively unattractive chubby girl and seeing a picture of you and her making out that your "friend" ninja took at the bar, the next day. Fuck that, why can't you all just leave my memories tainted by a drunken haze, where she looked pretty hot.
I used to have a facebook account, and I was only friends with my "real friends in the real world." As in, if I have your number in my phone book, then we were friends on facebook. Stupid, really, but like many others, I didn't see the reason to be "friends" with 1,200+ people I could give a shit less about. I'll admit, I was one of those facebook-junkies. I would check my page dozens of times during the day. It was so counter-productive, and inside, I hated it. Then my ex-girlfriend and I broke up, and I didn't want to have see anything she was doing; whether it was through the news-feed or pictures or anything else I know I would have checked, so I deleted my account. The most immature and idiotic reason, I know, but I think I was just looking for a reason to delete it. Now, I couldn't be happier. I knew I should have deleted it a long time ago, but I used to rationale that I was keeping in touch with friends in other states, saving pictures, etc. But the last thing I needed, as a teacher and coach, was for some stupid, drunken picture of me to show up online and embarass me. Because of this whole social-network phenomenon, I feel like I have to be a lot more careful when I'm out, and my friends know not to take pictures of any of us while we're looking stupid and post them online. I hardly find myself online anymore -- I get my email on my phone, and only really check ESPN.com and this site, also on my phone -- and I feel like I have so much more free time since I'm not compelled to check facebook. So, hi ... my name is Riggins, and I'm a recovering facebook-addict.