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I think I may have temporarily derailed Usher's career. After I started syncing my music site's account to my Facebook profile, cool folks could see that Usher was a middle-aged suburban dad's most listened to artist. Followed by Chopin. And Jason Mraz. But (gulp) Eazy-E was climbing the charts threatening to knock all my safe VH-1 alt-pop down a notch. They kind of clashed with my Buffy photo of Allyson Hannigan, which was painful to delete, but needed to be done in order to purge my FB profile of way too much information. This isn't the kind of information that a client should see and wonder about. After all, Hannigan is a lovely woman with great comedy acting chops who is most famous for her role as a lesbian witch. If my born-again uncle ever made it to the site, he might have needed to be born yet a third time to recover. Facebook in insidious. One minute, you're competing in Name That Tune against a marketing rep from a Sony company, and the next finds you adding your fourth personality profile to your FB profile that week. Throw in some Harry Potter spells, green leaves to show how eco-friendly you could be, ranking your friends and business acquaintances on who smells nicer, and too much information blows up into a psychological profile. This is the kind of stuff you chat about with friends over dinner, not the kind of information you capture neatly on the web for anyone to see. Don't think people can see it? Check out how fast iLike was hacked on Plaxo this week. I don't mind telling friends and acquaintances my religious or political views if they ask, but I really don't need to wear them on my sleeve so that Social Ads can perfectly target me. So after a rambling comment yesterday on Dan London's post about Yahoo's latest foray into social, I decided to start cleaning my 'graph. I had heard about people declaring email bankruptcy, but I use a nice array of filters and tools to keep email at bay. What I needed to save myself from was another 10 minute plunge into TV Trivia and declare social bankruptcy. So I mused on this site about Facebook bankruptcy and took the plunge today. I feel great. Harry Potter, CD shelves and zombies are all relegated to whatever backup data file Facebook will have to turn over to the NSA one day. Until then, though, I'm clean. There's an email address, a link to my wife (who never went in for all the goofiness) and my friends list. That's it. Someone can use the platform to message me if they forget my email. I even left my Skype-In number for folks who want to hear me and aren't within 15 feet of a telephone for some reason. I am waiting for a thank you message from Usher any day, but I sure do miss that Ally Hannigan photo. | |||||||
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April 30th Inspirational - I just purged my FB profile, 'George-Style'. You're right. Facebook can become a real mess without the occasional spring clean. More applications essentially leads to more time-wasting...  Reply
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5.00 (Excellent) Vote:
April 23rd This is an interesting approach to the overload of social networking in today's environment. But don't let the Spokeo.com's of the world hear you say or promote this... they are counting on that overload to bulid their business. This does bring up another concept which has been reported upon recently. How much time and efficiency is lost to playing with the FB's and what is the true measure of their success from a professional perspective? The sites themselves would like to keep you on there as long as possible to drive up ad revenue and justify performance metrics to their BoD's. I tend to agree with George that there is some value in using these services to remain connected to colleagues both near and far (at least from a professional perspective). Someone using these services to foster new business relationships would more likely log on for a specific purpose (say to get a colleagues contact info or to try to identify and target someone with whom they can do business) and get off to continue with their other work related activities. And having a bunch of self proclomations about what movies you like, your political affiliation, or how many drinks someone has sent you really doesn't accomplish anything from a professional perspective. Sure those are fun in your personal time, but do you really want a colleague, customer, boss, etc. to know you are friends with someone becuase you "hooked up" once? Sites like LinkedIn, Plaxo, & Spoke all provide professional networking services, but how much time do you really spend on those sites compared to FB? As this space evolves more for businesspeople it will be interesting to see how the services tairlor their offerings... Reply
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April 29th Thanks for the kind words George. Truth be told I'm in the industry and work for one of the companies I referenced, so I have a vested interest in how this plays out. My comments are a view I've developed over time while analyzing how people use our service against online advertising initiatives. There is a definite distinction in usage patterns based upon theme and anyone who is developing or is part of a similar site should be aware that holding their company to "time on site" or "page view" metrics can be misleading; depending on your communities' theme. What is important is that they understand how their users will use their service and develop success metrics which mirror that behavior so that they can capitalize on their members' behavior instead of trying to change that behavior to be more like that of an alternate theme/site. In classic new media format: twt (time will tell - thats a new one I just coined...) Reply
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January 8th You are now my idol ... If only letting go of the facebook pipe was so easy.
Do you have a counselor who helped you through the process? :) Reply
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January 8th Rob & Dan, thanks!
Rob, it's been tough. I keep having friends "discover" FB and email me a friend request. Or you get some worthy charitable thing that you just want to respond to and know that it's like taking one more hit off that pipe (so I've heard). I'm replacing FB with a Gooruze addiction! Reply
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January 8th Haha ... no kidding. I hear from some Psychology knowing friends that everyone has a vice, will always have a vice... so the name of the game is to turn a vice into a productive or educational activity, rather than a useless guilty pleasure.
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