Tag Archives: facebook

Social media

The Facebook experiment

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Facebook.Given the open-ness and superior sharing controls of Google+ I’ve started the process of thinning down my Facebook friends list – this is partially an attempt to regain some sense of personal freedom for my "private" space on FB, and partially out of consideration for the contacts on my friends list inundated with my endless blog posts and photos of my daughter on their news feeds.

I’ve ‘unfriended’ about 20% of my list (I’d considered just moving them to a ‘limited view’ friend status but didn’t really see the point – the people I’ve unsubscribed have had very little interaction or conversation with me for some considerable time now), and we’ll see if anyone notices. I am hoping others fed up with me will unfriend me themselves – as my friends list crept upward I had a sneaking suspicion – which I’m sure will be justified by minimal re-adds – that I wasn’t as popular as Facebook was intimating.

Anyway, I sincerely hope I haven’t caused any offence and will happily get back in contact with people who so desire it!

Social media

On refining my Facebook circles

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Facebook friend wheelThe advent of Google+ has had me thinking about my Facebook friends list – I have over 500 people on there and anyone who knows me well will tell you that I’m not that popular. But years of adding everyone I’ve gained more than a passing familiarity with and accepting friendship requests from the like has left me – perhaps – oversharing slightly. So a process of Spring cleaning must begin, and some criteria must be applied.

But rather than wholesale defriending people, I think I’ll go through a more Google-esque process, trying to align friends by how I know them (for the most part), restricting access to my updates to the people less likely to be interested in family pics, blog posts and the like. It’ll be a fairly tedious exercise but hopefully better for all involved.

If you’ve not been in regular contact but want to remain in an ‘open’ circle and see all my updates, do let me know…

Social media

On Google+ and Facebook

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Google+å’ŒfacebookSo I love the concept of Circles, but Google+ isn’t quite there for me yet.

Here’s why not:

1) No APIs yet, so no limited extensibility and hard to work into my social media syndication strategy – I can’t get my blog to cross post to G+, for example. The xhtml / rel=me thing should work but between my ineptitude at HTML and bugginess in Buzz, I can’t make it work.

2) Not enough people on there that I actually know – the only circles of mine where people are saying anything are “randoms,” “journalists” and “PRs” – which tells you a bit about the early adopters I know.

3) Too many randoms are adding me for no apparent reason – I can understand why some of the big hitters have stepped off the platform within days of joining

4) I don’t use enough of the other Google apps (Picasa etc) that would make it really useful. Maybe I should.

On Facebook at the moment I have one fundamental complaint:  the newsfeed’s selection of news stories is currently completely borked. I’m getting old stories from a very small set of my friend-network because Facebook is trying to guess which "circles" I want to hear from and excluding many of my friends.

Sort it out, the pair of you!

Current affairs, Media & Marketing, Social media

French gov’t bans mentions of social networks by name on radio

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I love this:

How do you say Facebook and Twitter in French? You don’t – at least, not if you are on radio or television, where French officials have banned any mention of them unless they are specifically part of the story.

Conspiracy theorists springing up all over the place as to why they’ve done it; the rationale makes a kind of sense to me, however – it’s in the spirit of fairness, so as to not discriminate against other lesser, commercial social networks. Even if its total rubbish, I love that sentiment. There’s something very colonial about it, and I’m surprised the British (given the other strictures at the BBC about supporting commercial organisations) haven’t tried it ("that anti-competition stuff, old boy, it’s simply not cricket.")

At least, force broadcasters to mention (and have a presence on) every other social network in the spirit of fairness. It’d take a week…

Social media

My personal social media syndication strategy

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The blog is connected to the… Twitter… The Twitter’s connected to the… Google Buzz… The Google Buzz is connected to the Facebook… and somewhere it all ends up a mess.

Inspired by this new WordPress feature, I’ve been trying to work out how to best link my various social sharing tools so that people can keep up with me as they’d like to. Here’s where I’ve ended up by way of automatic syndication / cross posting:

1) My blogs (this one and LSR) syndicate to Twitter, Google Buzz, LinkedIn and my Facebook page

2) My Google Reader shared items (interesting news stories I’ve seen around the web) syndicate to Twitter, and Google Buzz

3) Twitter syndicates to nowhere; if you’d like to keep up with my Tweets, follow me. I don’t think I’ve even connected it to LinkedIn.

4) Flickr syndicates to Facebook and Google Buzz (although I use it less and less these days)

5) I don’t pay attention to FriendFeed, Quora, MySpace, FourSquare, YouTube, Friendster or any of the half-dozen or so other, less useful to me social venues. But who knows, someday I may do.

6) Gyminee / Dailyburn may become useful again once I restart the diet and the half-marathon training, and Runkeeper probably needs integrating somewhere – it does automatically post to Facebook.

If the world understood and used RSS readers I’d be less concerned about all of this, but given that not all of you do, I’m going with this approach. Hopefully its focussed enough and there isn’t so much overlap its annoying.

I need a personal social media strategy? Who knew!?

What do you do to simplify the share/follow experience for your friends/fans/family?