Don't worry, be social

Thing Six: Social networking

Facebook

What can I say? I'm a lurker. I haven't set up my own profile, but I do use my husband's on occassion. He's friended with the one friend of mine that I like to follow, he's friended with my siblings and their wives as well as his relatives and friends, and a couple of my friends have friended him in an attempt to get to me but they don't post much. There's one sister-in-law that I do not know very well except through her Facebook updates and I was totally surprised when we all spent Christmas together this year. She is a very different person in person than on Facebook and I mean TOTALLY different. Which one is her? I kinda like her fb persona better.

But Facebook is a little scary too. Recently I got yet another invitation to friend someone and to this invitation Facebook added a list of others who have invited me in the past. Thank you Facebook, I know very well 'cause you keep sending me reminders, quit harrassing me! Friends who know me know that is the exact opposite thing to do to sell me on something. But that's not the scary part. The scary part was the next list, the list of people Facebook thought I might know. One is a friend married to a college friend, two are archivist friends, one is a museum friend, two are from the archival world who I know of but do not actually know, and three I think are friends of friends from a college alumnae group. Only the archivst ones would be even remotely connected to the friend who provided the opening for this latest onslaught. Just what information has Facebook already gathered about me? And what are they going to do with all the information everybody is so freely giving them? When LinkedIn does this it isn't scary 'cause I can tell how they think that based on who I am connected to. But I'm not on Facebook and the people on the list are not connected to each other. The one bright spot is they have my name wrong?!?! For once a programmer's laziness in dealing with names with apostrophes in them is going to help me.

Ning

I already have a profile on Ning, but I couldn't reconcile that with the invitation to the 23things Ning so now I have two profiles on there. I can't comment much right now about the 23things Ning 'cause I just got too frustrated trying to unify my two profiles and the lack of guidance on the Ning homepage. I will say that the other Ning I am on has gone totally dormant. This type of thing needs a critical mass to keep it going and STABA (Science and Technology Archivists of the Bay Area) just doesn't have it. The in-person group has gone dormant too. I do check in on the Lone Archivists Ning from time to time and they have interesting discussions sometimes. So far, I have not cared for Ning sites, they are far too cluttered, but I don't know whether that is Ning's fault or just everybody trying to use all the bells and whistles. I am too far behind on my things to spend much more time here right now.