now, a year and a half later, my dynamic has shifted. I have about 1100 friends on facebook, but i have about 1450 people that i have circled and about 1350 people that have me circled on g+ – and between the two social network giants, less than 40 of those are duplicates – most of my facebook friends opted not to use g+ with any regularity, and of all of the new people that i’ve met on g+, only a small handful have turned into facebook relationships.

As a reader of social media, this is pretty great. my fb feed has always been a constant stream of posts, and my g+ stream is even busier even with how i attempt to control the “volume” of my stream through custom circles. i get a wide variety of content on both streams, ranging from broad topics that i specifically hone my g+ circles to focus on to more personal thoughts or life-happenings and sometimes intimate and close discussions on both facebook and g+.

But as a blogger and a social media contributor, this potential large audience that has little crossover on fb and g+ is incredibly problematic because of how it dilutes my online presence. Since my two blogs (this one and my livejournal) are separated loosely by “professional” vs “personal” content, there’s no duplication between them and each has a clear intent. By contrast, facebook and g+ right now serve as incredibly similar outlets of my microblogging expression to two vastly different audiences – and when i want to share good news or that cool article, i want to share it with everyone that i know – which means that i crosspost and duplicate posts across facebook and google plus more often than not. That may seem like it’s not a big deal since the audiences are vastly different, but to me it’s still a big deal because it means that people who circle me on g+ don’t have as much incentive to friend me on facebook and vice versa, and it also means that any potential dialogue on stuff that i post to both feeds is split and unfocused.

A part of me wishes that I could abandon facebook as a contributor and merely use it as a touchpoint to follow those who choose to use it as their main internet presence, but as someone who wants to share my personal life selflessly and promote my professional life selfishly, that’s simply not the right thing to do. I’m not so full of myself that i think that everyone should always listen to what i have to say, but i’m also self-actualized enough to know that i am a positive force in the lives of many people both casually and intimately, and because this also leads to people actually caring about me as a person and actually wanting to hear what i have to say, I have a strong sense of obligation to share my life and thoughts with those that are willing to listen in an effort to enhance our relationship and/or enhance their life, and subsequently enhance my own.

That said, I also know that in the grand scheme of things I”m a nobody. That’s not meant as a self deprecating statement any more than the previous paragraph is supposed to be egotistical and vain. Getting into that would be highly tangential to the point of this post; i bring it up because in reality (and seemingly in contraction to that last paragraph, but not really) the only reason that i matter is because people know that i matter, and if i wasn’t there, something or someone else would fill that void and i’d be forgotten, and that makes the idea of retreating from my facebook presence more viable – and if facebook or g+ ever reached a point where that strong sense of obligation were to ever become such a pressure on myself to cause me more emotional strife than emotional gain, i’d strongly consider it. But that’s not true, therefore not an option, and therefore the problem remains.

But as i go through the thought process that brought about the last couple of paragraphs, maybe the conclusion is that while I do see it as a problem, it’s not a huge problem, and the desire to address it is purely academic and self-masturbatory. I think it’s a problem because it feels inefficient for me who likes to have a very strong handle on how i present myself as a person and a brand, but the outcome of fixing that is a minimal gain for the amount of energy it would take for me to deal with it. That means that i should probably just keep doing what i’m doing, make slight adjustments as i see fit, stop worrying about it so much, and focus on what really matters.

Which is pretty funny, because it makes this whole post feel useless and self-masturbatory, and makes me feel like i’m living in a self-delusional dreamland. Which is probably true, so i can at least pretend to feel good about the fact that i’m self-actualized about it.

five things i like about facebook more than google plus:

1. degree of interaction on my own posts. Part of it is that i know that i’m quirky and i don’t try to conform posts in a way to get more hits, something that can be very prevalent on g+. Another is that i’m not an attractive female who works in a geeky tech industry. Whatever the reason, if i post the same thing on fb vs g+ (of which my readers are pretty much a completely different group of 1000 people each), many more people will interact with me on the fb side than the g+ side.

2. visibility of interactions on pages and groups. when someone comments on something on the TUMB page on facebook, i can see that as a little notation-number on my main feed, so i get notified even if i don’t actively visit my page. on the TUMB page on g+, i need to navigate to that page first as an admin before i see whether or not i’ve gotten any interaction, and that’s an extra step that can be easily neglected, and thus make me lose some of my audience unless i’m actively diligent.

3. currency of contact information. a lot of my real-life friends and acquaintances keep their information up to date on facebook and use facebook regularly enough that it has made it possible for me to travel anywhere and know how to get in touch with someone to hang out. particularly for holiday travel, i’ve been able to touch base with people who i’d otherwise have no idea how to contact to get together with them. contacting people privately on g+ is clunkier given that it’s much closer to a twitter paradigm than a facebook one, which makes it more difficult to have quality private interactions.

4. there are less spam accounts on fb than g+. There are many times when someone circles me on g+, i go to look at their profile page and their stream, and it’s either a spambot whose entire stream is filled with links back to some fishy and phishy website or it’s a real person, but they’re using their personal account mainly to push their own marketing and otherwise has very little original content. With a few exceptions, all of my fb friends are just people being people and not trying to be a business, knowing that if they want to do more of that sort of marketing business it should be more in the context of a Page.

5. …okay. i can’t think of a number 5.

five things i like about google plus more than facebook:

1. quality of posts on my stream. hands down, my g+ is much more interesting for me to read. What flows through my stream is a combination of personal things by awesome people, posts about similar interests to mine, quality images taken by some phenomenal photographers particularly in the realm of world architecture, and other shares of some incredibly innovative technology ideas, deep political analyses, awesome recipes, or whatever. A lot of this comes from my very direct ability to control all content that appears in my stream through circle management – i don’t circle people who post an insane amount of #caturday posts or use their stream to just share their favorite music video of the day or are too anti-Apple or anti-facebook (which can be prevalent).

2. image quality. photographs and pictures are just better on g+ in what people opt to post and share and how those images are dealt with on g+/picasa. if i upload a 1440×1280 picture on g+ i can redownload it at the same dimensions and same quality as what i uploaded. If i do the same on fb, the only download i can do is the version that fb has compressed and reduced in pixels and quality, and although i’m no professional photographer, i do consider myself an amateur and boy does that irk me.

3. trust in google over facebook there’s a faction of anti-google people out there for whatever reason, people that see it as Just Another Huge Evil Corporation. Google has made its share of mistakes, but in general the quality of the products they put out is outstanding and the mission of the corporation from the top down is something i think is pretty amazing. I’m not a huge google fanboy exactly, but i do believe in the company, particularly since i soemtimes talk to my brother about it (who is a google employee) and i trust his judgement a great deal. I trust how they do their business, what experience they try to bring to the world and the reasons behind it. I have no such trust in facebook. i believe that zuckman is pretty much just out for #1, and the decisions that are made regarding data privacy, how they try to change the user experience, and the general integrity of the company do not make me trust it.

4. google plus promotes embracing a larger community and meeting new people in a way that facebook doesn’t. With the Prolific community on facebook being the noted exception, facebook is comprised 99% of people that i know in real life whether casual acquaintances or close friends. It’s not a platform in which i can discover new people easily. On g+, almost everyone in my circles is someone that i met only through g+, and some of them have become very good friends. In that way it reminds me much more of the way that livejournal used to be when that was the dominant social platform – strangers discovered each other, interacted with each other, and could have meaningful relationships and interactions. g+ is designed to foster that same sort of discovery, and has resultantly exposed me to a wider new orleans community as well as a like-minded base of people from everywhere across the world that i feel absolutely comfortable hopping into a google hangout with and just shooting the shit.

5. i completely control my stream content on g+ and it will never involve ads. One of the big differences between g+ and facebook in this regard is that g+ is just an aspect of a larger company that already has a hugely successful model for generating revenue, so there’s no need to put ads into g+. Especially since facebook’s IPO, Zuckman is under a lot of pressure to generate much more revenue and at a much higher pace than before facebook went public, and as a result facebook has seen more intrusive advertising on both the website and the mobile app. This is absolutely the right thing for facebook to do from a business sense, but it creates a tainted user experience which can already feel cluttered as it is as well as biased with the introduction of Promoted Posts.

The Bottom Line

Facebook and Google+ are different experiences. facebook is where i go to see what my friends decide to randomly post and is also my largest audience for personal and business content. google+ is where i go to meet strangers and read content from around the globe from fascinating people that have embraced google+ as their conduit, and it’s also a much more open platform where strangers from anywhere across the globe aren’t afraid to video chat together and find some amazing connections. They both have their roles and these days i’ve been embracing both accordingly.

That said, one thing that sticks out most between the two social media platforms is my attitude about migration. As in if all of my friends on fb migrated over to g+, then the only reason i would keep my fb is to administer the TUMB pages i control for my work. By contrast, if all of my friends on g+ migrated to fb, i wouldn’t give g+ up – i would go out and find more people or different content and likely use that as my primary place of internet surfing because there’s always new stuff to discover in a way that i can tune however i want.

We’ll start with the two blogs that i maintain, because although those are already pretty defined in my head, i’m going to adjust and refine the role that my blogs have to be an even greater separation between my professional and “conceptual” entries which will live on mendellee.com versus my life entries and “specialized” entries which will live on my livejournal. Before, my LJ served multiple purposes – it involved things going on in my life, but i also used it as a “short thoughts” blog, an “ideas” blog, a movie/game/tv review blog, things of that sort of nature. I still feel like it’s more appropriate to house my life and any random movie/game/tv reviews in that context, but i’m going to shift most of my “short thoughts” and “ideas” content to here, as well as some life stuff that may involve my schedule as it relates to creative projects or creative processes.

I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. One, I feel like this site needs to have more activity, that this should become a more important hub for my public presence, and hopefully shifting some of what used to be LJ activity will help with that. Two, I’m trying to encourage myself to write more about my Actual Life on my LJ which wasn’t exactly the idea when i first started my LJ but has leaned more towards that in the past year and I want to continue. There’s a multi-layered motivation for doing this related to a couple of events that happened over the summer which i may discuss in a separate post on my LJ.

That’s the easy stuff. Now we come to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. Each of these needs to be addressed in two respects – as a contributor and as a reader. I’ll address each service separately.

Twitter: Originally I created a Twitter account as a means of shifting the concept of “status messages” from facebook to a paradigm where i felt it better fit. (in case you missed it, i wrote about why.) I then ported over selective statuses to fb by using “Selective Tweets.” Since that time, I’ve activated some privacy protocols that makes Selective Tweets not work, and i’ve relaxed my stance concerning the value of fb statuses as it relates to my fb page. So Twitter became a more nebulous space as a contributor, and with the inclusion of google plus, i started to use my twitter less and less, seeing g+ as a preferred method of posting random microblog bursts.

A part of me feels like I could abandon Twitter altogether, but a greater part of me feels like that’s the wrong thing to do. Twitter is a great tool with some key sets of expectation that isn’t met by any other social media. So in order to make myself more proactive in that realm, i need to create a definition for how i want to use it and brand myself in its use.

There are a few common paradigms for twitter use, and many of them are ones that I reject. I don’t want my twitter to be a personal advertising space. Neither do i want my twitter to be a conduit for my other presence on the web or for the “check-in” concept that’s promoted by the likes of foursquare or yelp.

So i think i’m going to use it in the way it used when it first existed: as a space for short life bursts. I’m also going to experiment with tweeting exclusively from a smart phone, considering it more of an on-the-go kind of thing.

Out of all of my social media, twitter will probably be my lowest priority when it comes to reading. I have a manageable list of people that i’m following, but some of the regular twitterers use it more as a conduit space than a speaking space, and that sort of tweeting to me is clutter and pollution that I don’t like filtering through. Check-ins are annoying because i don’t really care where people are. redirects or link postings are annoying because without having context that twitter can’t provide it’s a coin-toss whether or not i’d find the link worthwhile. Not that i’ll never read twitter ever, but i don’t feel an overwhelming need to stay on top of it.

Facebook: i was a relative latecomer to the facebook generation and have never been afraid to voice my opinions about what i feel are the big positives and negatives of facebook. I don’t hate it, but i am always mindful of some of its huge pitfalls and approach my use of it both as a contributor and a reader with a high degree of wariness.

what value i get from facebook as a reliable virtual rolodex, the kind of created culture that it represents, and the role it plays in my social presence as a personal broadcaster and a professional broadcaster through the marching band is too important for me to abandon facebook despite the fact that I don’t actually like it all that much. The recent facebook release in particular is problematic because there are now too many decisions about visual design and priority of content that are made for me behind the scenes, and those decisions are deliberately designed to be difficult to change. (i addressed this in the latter part of the aforementioned “social identity problems” post if you’re interested in the specifics).

What does this mean for me as a contributor and user of facebook now?

As a reader, what i want to happen is to be able to capture a slice of time of whatever happens to be on my news feed of the time of all 1000ish of my friends and be content with that. This means that i should probably do a similar thing that Mark did with his and do the painstaking work of changing all of my friends subscriptions to “all” posts instead of “most” posts (which i can unfortunately only do one friend at a time).

As a contributor, honestly, i still don’t have a great answer. I’ve decided that I still want my facebook to be pretty much All Surface and start to conceive of my google plus as being a potentially more intimate social atmosphere, something that can be inbetween facebook and livejournal, but exactly how that plays out practically is still yet to be defined. It still feels right for me to use fb as a conduit for my other social presence, but google plus has that place too, and i’m not sure how to achieve balance in how that could be used across both social mediums. It could be something as simple as “LJ entries go on fb, mendellee entries go on g+”, but with the power of g+’s circles allowing for more flexibility in that, that feels like an easy-but-not-quite-right answer that with a little work could be better defined and honed.

speaking of which.

google plus: in comparison to both twitter and facebook, my google plus feed is somewhat of a ghost town, and contrary to this being a deterrent, it’s rather a nice breath of fresh air. The problem is that if i want to try to shift more of my contributions and reading to google plus, it could easily end up feeling as unmanageable as facebook can be, both in the way i choose to write and the way i choose to read.

This is where i think careful manipulation of my circles will come into play. Right now i have a lot of incredibly impractical circle definitions that all need a complete revamp. At a basic level, i need to create two kinds of circles: “reading” circles and “filtering” circles. Reading circles don’t need to be defined right now because my traffic isn’t high enough, but a part of me is starting to feel like the best way to deal with reading circles has to do with the frequency of a poster. Prolific posters will get one circle, once a week posters will get another, once a month will get another, and some levels in between based on the amount of traffic. The main purpose/function of this would be to ensure that amidst the regular g+’ers i don’t miss something from a user that sticks a singular post within the busy throngs, which is philosophically closer to how i treat livejournal (everything that’s written on my friends page/circles stream is important) rather than twitter or facebook (all i care about is what happens to be going on at the moment).

As far as filtering, the only one that’s currently important to define is current students versus non-current students to help create that necessary separation between personal and professional. Beyond that, defining filtering circles is more difficult because a part of me feels like it should be as much in the hands of those who are reading me as myself. It may be that i won’t mind sharing more intimate details with person A and B, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to actually hear it, and i want to be able to respect that.

Practically that’s a difficult thing to address. It’s fine if i just deal with the people who are in my “reading” circles now, but when someone new comes along, they don’t have a conception of how i could be using circles well enough to know how to fit in mine, and it’s counterintuitive to me to put someone who just added me into their circles through a equivalent of a detailed questionnaire just to put them into my circles. That’s just obnoxious.

That side of it is full of conjecture anyway because i’m not sure exactly how intimate of a space i can put myself into online in the first place – even in a relatively comfortable setting like livejournal i tend to hold back on things that make me feel weak or vulnerable. There’s a couple periods of my life where i went through some intense emotional trauma that still impacts my life outlook today, but to most of the world that trauma is invisible – as well it should be. That sort of stuff is not meant to be publicized no matter how close or intimate a “circle” can be. But as with all things, there’s a wide spectrum between extremes that can be explored and toyed with, and google plus is where that potential can be.

The other potential choice of “filtering” circles has to do with conduits. As in, if i start to use g+ in a conduit way like i use fb to publish videos, LJ posts, and mendellee.com posts, i can create circles specifically for those so that those who have no interest in being a part of my conduit world won’t see that stuff. So if you have absolutely no interest in seeing when i post up LJ posts because, say, you’re already my LJ friend or you just don’t care about my life in that sort of detail, you don’t go into the LJ circle which is the only way that you’ll see that stuff appear on my feed. Of course, this leaves out “lurkers” from being able to see whenever i post to LJ, and highlights one of the other issues of filtering circles in general which is that filtering circles necessitates a mutual relationship when maybe i don’t want it to be. If a stranger decides to follow me on g+, adding them to a circle kind of means that i’m following them back; sure, i can stick them into a circle full of people that i’ll never read, but that reeks of subterfuge to my virtual nose and i don’t want to be associated with that sort of virtual smell.

We’ll see how all of this develops; in any case, it’s a starting point, a way to more clearly define my roles in all of these mediums and start to use all of them to their fullest potential (at least for me). As these roles take shape over time, i’m sure some small and big adjustments will be made. If it’s significant and interesting enough for me to talk about, i’m sure another entry will pop here.

In other words, how do i choose to use facebook differently than google plus? What would make me write a blog entry on my domain blog vs. my livejournal? What constitutes a twitter status over a fb status or a g+ stream post? Some of these questions can be answered, but some of them cannot, and it’s the ones that cannot that i feel i need to focus on and refine.

With my two blogs, i deliberately separate what content i choose to put where. My livejournal blog is about my life and my friends and thoughts of a more personal nature, whereas this wordpress blog is my more public face with content bent towards thoughts of a more long-winded and cerebral nature. I call this wordpress blog my thoughts blog. I call my LJ my life blog. Even though there is sometimes a degree of blur, i think it’s pretty clear to myself and to my audience what content belongs where.

It’s this sort of distinction that i feel like i need to have between facebook and google plus. Like my two blogs, i feel like the purpose and audience of those are very similar, and therefore the uniqueness of them comes entirely from the content that i choose to write. despite the fact that one *could* use fb in the same way as g+, doing so arbitrarily is problematic because of the audience i’m trying to reach. I want my friends on fb to get something different than those who subscribe to my g+ feed. To have a heavy degree of duplication or even similarity in style between those two feels wrong; someone would likely only subscribe to one or the other, or those that subscribe to both wouldn’t get much different out of one versus the other, and that’s not what i want.

Despite the recent changes facebook has made that has seemed to alienate some people, facebook still holds my largest audience and thus it acts as my “hub” for most of my other social media, meaning that i import some of my tweets to fb, i post links from select blog entries here and LJ to fb, and i post links from my youtube page to fb. But i don’t want to use facebook as a hub for google plus. Google plus needs to stand out on its own in the same way that my blogs stand out on their own.

But how should that happen? I don’t really want fb or google plus to have the same professional vs. personal distinction that my blogs do. And despite my desire to not have a heavy degree of duplication between fb and g+, the fact is that what i choose to share of myself on the internet doesn’t have much content variance other than that.

So maybe this is an opportunity to change that. g+’s Circles has a great deal of flexibility as it relates to selective sharing, so it’s possible that i could write things of a more personal nature if i structure it in a way that i trust. Or maybe this is an opportunity to ween myself off of any direct relationship to fb and use it merely as a conduit, because the new changes that fb rolled out have some advantages, but they also a direction change for that platform that enhances everything about fb that i dislike.

That last statement warrants some expansion. There are two aspects of the new fb changes that bother me the most.

First is the upper right news ticker. That news ticker doesn’t seem like a huge change, but i have to hand it to fb: it’s absolute genius.

Tickers are one of the big reasons why i never watch rolling news channels and why i can have issues watching sports channels. When you first get introduced to the idea of a ticker, it seems like a big distraction, but the more you watch the channel, the more you get used to it and incorporate it into your understanding of how that channel works. I don’t watch sports obsessively, but i watch enough of it that that i don’t notice the bottom ticker unless i want to. I don’t watch news channels ever, so those tickers are a constant source of flash and distraction, but if i were to watch the channel more often, i know that i would absorb and become accustomed to it. And once you get used to the ticker being there and what it represents, the ticker’s purpose has been maximized: to provide another avenue of constant change of information that’s designed to keep you watching.

The internet in general hasn’t really used the ticker paradigm for much; the NFL uses a variant of it on their website with big neon flashing signs whenever there’s a score change or a big play during a game that you’re not tracking or watching. But now, fb is changing that game, using that ticker formula in a way that will try to keep people logged on that much more often because they can and will always look at it for change of information whether they want to or not. And sure, most people hate it now, but give it some time for people to get used to it, and before you know it, it will seem Normal, and that constantly shifting and changing ticker of useless information will help make fb an even bigger time suck than it already is.

Secondly, fb has added a higher degree of customizability to how people view their feeds, and normally as a guy who is all about data and loves having the ability to be versatile with it, the way in which fb has incorporated this flexibility is counter to how i want to use fb.

fb is a dominant part of our culture. i don’t think that it’s inherently bad or good; like any tool or piece of technology, how bad or good it is is dependent upon how it’s used.

My use of fb as both a poster and a viewer is deliberately designed to be all surface – as a poster, fb acts as a good conduit for me to contact people and to get some basic interaction with those people. What fb does *not* serve as is a place where i want to have any real meaningful interaction. It is not a platform for my political views, it is not a place where i want to divulge the real personal details of the person that i truly am, and it is not a place where i am going to put important details about anything going on in my life in a way that assumes that people who are close to me are going to read it.

As a viewer, i want to see on my news feed a slice of what has happened the most recently with whoever has happened to post. i don’t assume that my friends that post important information on fb expect me to get that information only from fb; if i catch it, awesome, but if i don’t, then it’s not a big loss because i would assume that the people closest to me would tell me important things outside of that fb context.

And this is where the customizability of the new fb becomes useless to me, because all of the customizability assumes that i want to control that information in a way that takes fb much more seriously than it should be taken. “i care the most about seeing feed items from these important people in my life, so i’m going to tailor my fb feed to see their stuff the most.” But the amount of time that it would take for me to micromanage and microcontrol fb’s settings to make it do what i want is simply not worth it. To customize it properly would take constant adjustment – more time spent on fb – just so that i can make fb more appealing to me – and thus spend even more time there than i currently do.

It’s food for thought. We’ll see what happens in the next month or so as fb and g+ and their respective userbase evolves, and as i start to refine my thoughts about how the fb shift and my use of both platforms could potentially change. i know i’m not going to delete my fb, but it may be that it becomes just my virtual business card – an easy way for people to reach me if they don’t have my current info – and not much else.

Very recently google came out with an iPhone app. it’s a pretty basic no-nonsense app that i like much better than the facebook app for loading time alone. But probably the coolest feature of the app is the ability to see an incoming stream of what is defined as “nearby”. As in, g+ figures out where you’re located, grabs public posts from the nearby area, and puts into its own custom stream.

So okay, g+. now i want that or a better variant of that available on the web version.

A version of this already happens in limited ways on fb. i have a slice of 100ish friends from PA or who used to be from PA, and at certain times, say, during a Philadelphia Phillies game or an Eagles game or similar, my fb wall explodes with people’s reactions to what’s happening in real time. It’s a strange “mob mentality” capture on the internet which at first i found to be one of the negatives of fb but now i kind of like even if it can be annoying when it’s something i don’t give two flips about.

The UI i picture is something like this: you click on a “map stream” button and it takes you to a google map with a circle on it defaulted by your current location and a radius/diameter that’s defined by you. Click OK or Submit and it gives you a stream of any public g+ posts within that circle. Those defaults should probably be saved as “home stream” or something. But then i want to be able to grab any slice of a google map in a circle and do the same thing. Suppose i live in new orleans and i just heard about an earthquake in san francisco, or i’m a big SF 49ers fan and a game is going on. I want to be able to go to my map stream, highlight a circle around the bay area, and see what people in that area have been posting about it.

It has some great novelty value, but also has some meetup/gathering potential if, say, i’m looking for something to do in town or generally want to know if there’s anything happening and want to get a flavor of that from people not necessarily in my own circles. So i use map stream to grab my area, see if anyone is posting about happenings, start a conversation about it or just show up to where the action is.

The other interesting potential is what happens if i select the entire world map during, say, coverage of Obama doing an international speech or during the World Cup. There’s fascinating potential there to observe and analyze social networking behavior that right now isn’t easy to capture using twitter or facebook.

Area streams/feeds are an area that i feel is an untapped potential, one of the more interesting things uncaptured by the current social network paradigm. How about it g+ developers? Seems easy enough to implement since you already do it on the iPhone app. Develop that puppy.

The old fb profile page supported fb’s original paradigm that a person’s fb presence was predominantly about statuses. It’s true that on a news feed you get a glimpse of an entire breadth of a person’s fb activity, but when you clicked on a person’s profile page, what you were given was the person’s name and their status that served as what was essentially the “title” of the page. Any other fb activity was hierarchically and literally below that title of name+status.

It’s because of this that i generally prescribed to the no-more-than-one-status-every-twenty-fours-hour rule. to me, statuses had a degree of semi-permanence and importance over anything else that i did on fb as it related specifically to the fb paradigm. importing blog entries, posting up youtube links, even fb photos served more as a conduit, something in which fb was the engine but not the main source, whereas fb statuses *was* essentially facebook.

The new fb profile page abandons putting status messages as a part of the person’s “name title”, and for me that represents a huge hierarchical shift, demoting statuses to an equal level of all other fb wall activity. Statuses no longer stick out over links, photos, game feeds, &c, so amongst a wall where all of that activity is happening, they get lost in the shuffle instead of being immediately in your face.

Resultingly, i feel like my main focus as a fb user has lost its appeal. I still like using fb as a conduit for my other primary residences on the internet and i like keeping up with other people on my wall, but my own status use feels like it’s diminished greatly without that semi-permanence and my conduit use was starting to trend towards overtaking my statuses in any case.

So i’ve decided to do something that i never thought i would do: open a twitter account. twitter is going to completely replace my fb statuses (as in i’m no longer going to do any facebook statuses or at least going to try very hard not to). the original intended twitter paradigm also makes me psychologically feel okay tweeting multiple times in a twenty-four hour period, so chances are i’ll be doing that.

I’m also making a deliberate choice to not import anything relating to my twitter to my fb page. As twitter is essentially the same thing as a fb status, it doesn’t make sense for me to abolish the concept of fb statuses as a main fb focus only to import what could be perceived as a fb status in a conduit format. Particularly since i intend on tweeting more often than i update fb statuses, i have no interest in spamming my friends’ news feeds with that content. fb is better served as my blogs conduit where at most i’ll write twice a day and rarely that. if people are interested enough in my short thoughts, they can get it directly by subscribing to my tweets.

we’ll see how my use of twitter evolves over time, what sort of stuff i may opt to emphasize in my tweets versus others, if at all. I may also just for fun intersperse a random meaningless fb status every once in a while just to throw people, or maybe install one of those rotating fb status things and put up a bunch of nonsense. that kind of fits my sort of aesthetic.

the installation was a little complicated but made simple by the plugin developer’s very straightforward installation guide. i *think* i did everything right; time will tell. There’s also a huge amount of customization/flexibility to how wp and fb interface that i may tweak here and there, but at least for right now i’ve set it up the way that i think i want it. Hopefully this will make entries that i post on this blog a bit more seamless in its fb integration and also prettier than what Notes tried to do previously with its RSS feed.

If anyone notices anything weird, let me know.

thank you. we now return you to your regularly scheduled programme.

i’m not sure if word branding has a more technical term to it, but when i use it, i’m talking about one of two things. The first use has to do with how a brand can become powerful enough that the company word or name can replace the common name. Back in the day, Sony came out with the portable tape player called the “Walkman” and it had a strong enough brand presence that “walkman” became synonymous with the portable tape player, which is similar to the brand presence of the iPod becoming pretty synonymous with “portable MP3 player”. The brand has such an overwhelming presence that a decent portion of the consumer market doesn’t even consider that there might be portable mp3 players out there other than the iPod.

Using the term “google” for internet search is another great example of this. People don’t “internet search” anymore, they “google.” Common use of that automatically undercuts any other search engine that currently still exists. I imagine that half of the internet users now never even heard of altavista.

The power of that first use of word branding is pretty clear. There’s a second use that’s etched itself into my brain lately (and is the main point of this entry): the branding of a common word so strongly that it creates an association with a company. Whether or not this form of branding is successful or not is still rolling about in my head.

Way back in the early days of livejournal and before the likes of facespace and mybook (um), there ended up being a debate about LJ’s use of the word “friend”, and it was a big enough deal that LJ almost came up with a different term to describe people whose LJs were connected to each other. The issue was that a school of LJ users objected to the use of the word ‘friend’ for LJs that they were following and followed them because they felt that just because they were connecting with someone’s LJ that didn’t necessarily mean that they were actually friends with that person. Calling someone on LJ their ‘friend’ when they didn’t feel like they were actually ‘friends’ could potentially create an awkward social situation. There was also a concern that if two people who were actually ‘friends’ but one didn’t want to share their ‘friends only’ LJ with the other, that it could also create social awkwardness. “How can you call me your friend in real life if i’m not your friend on LJ?” and other similar nonsense.

LJ decided to hold on to the concept of “friend” and that years later became pretty moot as facebook became more popular and used the term “friend” in an even more reinterpreted fashion than LJ did. This is what i mean by “branding a common word” – the word “friend” has a different definition when put in the context of LJ and a further different definition when put in the context of fb, and on the internet, use of the word “friend” can potentially create an association with those websites in itself.

The second and much stronger example of this is the use of the word “like”. when fb first rolled out the “like” concept, it applied mainly to status updates, but it wasn’t too long before anything facebook was “like”able: status updates, shared links, comments left by other people on statuses or photos, &c. It became such a hit that they changed their “become a fan!” concept to “liking”, and it had such an influence that other websites started linking fb “liking” to their website or creating their own version of “liking” for their own website. I wouldn’t be surprised if soon you’ll be able to “like” best hits on a google search.

It’s clear that “liking” in that context is a strong brand with our current fb dominant generation. The question is whether or not creating that brand around the common word “like” is more successful than creating a custom brand that’s fb specific. On the one hand, i feel that branding the word “like” is unsuccessful because no matter how trendy and associative it can be, it’s still so much of a common word outside of the context of fb that it doesn’t create that association all of the time. when you’re in normal conversation and you say the word “like”, it doesn’t necessarily create an association with fb, whereas if you’re in normal conversation and you say “google”, the company and the web engine search immediately pops into mind. (i’m sure that the number one followed by one hundred zeros is misspelled “google” all of the time now.)
On the other hand, filter down to even a broad context of “the internet” and talk about “liking” something and that concept can be immediately associated with fb as the trend setter.

(as a tangent: for me, i’ve never *cough* liked “liking” on fb. it’s something that i will never do except in the case of what used to be “becoming a fan” because it doesn’t fit in my personality to “like” something rather than leave a comment. “liking’ something creates a level of interactive conformity that i already have issue with regarding facebook, and it’s more important for me to take the effort to actually say something, even if it’s just “awesome” and make it my own than to click on a button and have it potentially classified as just one in a throng of what someone else has done.)

Now, fb has rolled out something new: “Questions”. It’s a fascinating feature to me mainly because i feel like there are already so many forums for asking questions outside of the context of fb, but that’s beside the point. The question *cough* that springs to mind has more to do with the brand of it. Why call it “questions”? Why not give it a stronger fb identity? Even something like “AskFB” or even “FB?” with a custom logo using the fb blue and the fb “f” could create a stronger brand and eventually dominate in the same way that “google” or “xerox” does.

as i type this out, a new speculation comes to mind, particularly with this rollout, that maybe the lack of customized branding is a very strict and deliberate company choice. If that’s true, that’s fascinating and kind of funny because if philosophically fb is opposed to the idea of custom branding for whatever reason (off the top of my head it could be to try to keep things simple for all ages of users, but whatever), then it’s possible and maybe even probable that the concept of “like” becoming a common-word brand wasn’t a part of the fb strategy, it was just a side-effect.

Which probably says a lot about how much fb is dominating our culture, but that’s a separate topic.

When i first joined, i had a healthy degree of skepticism as to what it was all about and what sort of people i wanted to have access to the information that i posted on it. At some point, i changed that philosophy and started allowing everyone and anyone to be my facebook friend regardless of their context to see what sort of effect that would have on me and the sort of interactions i have and people have with me.

What i think i’ve discovered after now having over 600 friends and two or so years of facebook interactions is that the interaction level on facebook feels like the equivalent of “people window shopping”. In my head i break it down into some rough subcategories: on the first tier, you’re skimming past someone’s status update or quiz result and while you may acknowledge that that stuff has passed by, once it passes by you don’t give it another thought. On the second tier, you may “glance at something interesting in the window” because a particular status or photo or whatnot catches your eye. And that might spurn a “like” or a comment or something similar. On the third tier, you may actually “walk into the store” either because something resonates with you or the person that posts it may be close enough to you as an actual Friend that it warrants you becoming more invested in it.

The analogy is far from perfect, but it hits upon my main point which is that in all of that process in shopping, you’re not actually committing yourself to anything concrete, you’re not making an actual purchase. Facebook equivalent interactions can seem to me to be similarly unreal, usually nothing more than a sophisticated version of giving a passing “hello” when you see a stranger or a casual friend on the street, or judging an entire song by the iTunes 20 second preview before you buy. Not that more meaningful interactions or friendships *can’t* exist on facebook, but the facebook paradigm doesn’t lend itself to doing that very well; most deeper level interactions on facebook happen outside of the facebook context.

Compare this to Livejournal or blogging networks in general where there are several people who i met first on livejournal and can now state “i love you” to even though i still have yet to meet some of them in person, how many people i care about enough that i would drop anything to help them out if they needed me.

Not that this is anything mind-blowingly new. My previous facebook ramblings concluded no differently that facebook functions merely as a touchpoint of greater human interaction rather than be the end of it. But the degree of that mentality needs to be retracted some, because my criticism of facebook and my promotion of livejournal is too black and white. Livejournal serves as a better tool for getting into someone’s head, but a) an LJer may decide to not treat it that way because even behind a friends lock, a journal can be too public, and b) with as many people and communities that i try to keep up with on a daily basis, i fall victim to skimming through entries as opposed to properly reading them which turns any potential deeper level interaction into nothing different than a facebook interaction.

On the flipside of this, i have to also acknowledge in facebook’s defense that depending on the user, a continual flurry of status updates/commentary/notes can give you at least enough of a surface-level bigger picture of what a person is to have the potential (if all parties are willing) to be that spark that leads to a deeper level of interaction that could turn into something more meaningful and permanent. I never would have imagined that there i would meet people on facebook that i would learn to care about in the way that i care about people, and while it’s rare, it’s definitely present.

All of this introspection leads to to a more established stabilization to my particular approach to facebook both as an observer and a contributor. A lot of it has to do with shaping my use of facebook in a way that best serves my purpose, and keeping perspective about what sorts of interactions hold what degree of value.

From an observer perspective, what this means is that i do my best to minimize the amount of pollution and unnecessary distraction that facebook offers and focus my energies on the aspects of facebook that are important to me. So i use no applications other than photos and notes; occasionally the Biggest Brain and Prolific out of nostalgia. I never turn on facebook chat because i stopped IMing a long time ago and have no desire to ever return to it with a few notable exceptions.

In reality, what i care about the most is status updates (and to a lesser degree photos and notes), and in this regard, the newest facebook app on the iPhone shines over facebook.com because unlike facebook.com, you can filter the news feed on the iPhone app to show just status updates and nothing else with no effort or complicated app blocking, &c.

Granted, the problem that can arise with status updates is that i as an observer don’t control how people choose to use status updates, and thus i can get a lot of information that i don’t want. What i care about the most has more to do with what the actual People are about, whether it’s their daily life stuff or what goes through their head. What i don’t care about is getting a sports update or a celebrity update or other similar sorts of things that i could get on my own if i wanted to. Not that i don’t appreciate the enthusiasm because there are certain things that i can get that Fandom about, but once i understand someone’s enthusiasm for it once or twice which adds to the picture of who they are, i’m not interested in it anymore unless there’s something more personal about it (such as photos of going to see the game live or a unique perspective).

Additionally, celebrity gossip/lives is something i care nothing about and used to stay blissfully ignorant of, but facebook has now made that pretty impossible. Very recently there seemed to be some sort of controversy surrounding Kanye West and the VMA awards (ATM machine? TUMB Marching Band?). I have no idea what actually happened (nor do i care to know), but it still bothers me that i know about it at all due to facebook statuses being a conduit for public reaction.

But i take the bad with the good and i can’t begrudge individuals for using their facebook in this way because it’s stuff that they care about or feel like reacting to, and that’s exactly what facebook is designed for. And so long as i have a medium in which i can get some bigger picture of what some people are all about, that still has some value, yes?

The potential problem/danger with that comes out when we shift the discussion to me as a contributor versus an observer and brings back the surface-level bigger picture versus deeper-level bigger picture discussion. As i was recently thinking more about how i choose to divulge information on facebook, i realized how i generally attempt to filter what i post to have nothing to do with (for lack of a better term) my soul, not necessarily because of facebook itself, but because of just how public facebook is. I have potentailly over 600 people looking at the stuff i write on facebook and that ranges from acquaintances, peers, close friends, students, teachers, superiors, subordinates, both past and present and future. put that way, it’s obvious how stupid it is to share anything that i deem as Truly Personal, and as that realization became more clear, i made a recent conscious choice to filter my contributions to facebook even further, and not ever post anything that truly defines my inner self. I went so far as to remove my “relationship status” and my “political views” from my profile as a personal stance against that sort of information having any play in my facebook universe. That doesn’t mean that facebook puts out a false impression of who i am; what i post on facebook is still Me, but only a particular facet of me, one that i carefully control.

(Tangentially, coming to this realization made me think that this must be what celebrities feel like all of the time, and that gave me a small epiphany that maybe that’s a part of the facebook appeal; in a way, it makes everyone a celebrity in their own context, and is thus a platform for people to feel like they have a high degree of importance. Which isn’t necessarily untrue; that’s a discussion for a future post.)

Now, i say that this is a *potential* problem/danger because i feel that it only arises based on individual perception. Surely a majority of facebook users employ a similar philosophy to their facebook usage whether consciously or sub-consciously, so as long as people grok that and don’t misconstrue certain kinds of interactions or lack of interactions as having any Real Meaning, then there’s no problem, right?

Except that this then brings up another level of a discussion: a) how much more of that surface level interaction we’re exposed to versus the pre-myspace/facebook/twitter era, and b) the attitude that can arise from the support of the facebook paradigm that this level of interaction is enough to clear a moral social conscience.

more on that in part two.

originally posted on darkblog resonate. i prefer any commentary or thoughts there.

since then, i’ve been much more open about letting any random high school acquiantance or former friend into my… “facebook life” as a self-psychological experiment, which is too complicated to get into with this entry. And since i’ve started doing this, a particular line of thinking has come into my brain having to do with the difference between facebook users of my high school/college generation versus the current high school/college generation.

For me, seeing these faces come back onto my radar in little snippets slowly but continuously feels like a very time-stretched version of the 10-year or 20-year high school reunion – and those sort of reunions have always seemed odd to me. After high school, i don’t hear anything from some of these people and then a decade later, the fact that we went to the same high school and maybe had passing conversations in the hall or were in classes together during a highly developmental time in our lives is supposed to be some sort of relevant “common ground” to shake hands?

One thing that facebook has taught me about this is that at least in an online concept, going through that is not merely not as painful as i thought it would be, it’s actually fun. i’m so fascinated with people and their experiences in general that any excuse to see where people are in their lives and the direction their paths take is awesome and valuable even if they’re strangers, so having some background on even casual acquaintances and where they are now is fascinating. But with some people, i scratch my head as to why they would be interested in anything about *me*; in my head, i’d be thinking, “who are you again?”, or “didn’t we talk maybe twice in the whole time we were in high school?”, or “didn’t you think i was a total loser?”

granted, again, all of us are in different places than we were, and so maybe the reinteraction is a reflection of that.

I’m tangenting again. The point is, people who use fb that are in high school and college now will never have that “stretched out 10-year reunion” sort of feeling. Facebook takes away that potential whether negative or positive to link to a past that was forgotten because facebook makes it much more difficult to create a true “past”. Ten years from now, they’re not going to be suddenly contacted and friended by people that they haven’t heard from in all that time since high school/college. Instead, ten years from now, they would have been casually reading through ten years of status updates, and casually looking at ten years of photos.

i feel like there’s a significant long-term implication about that, and i’m not quite sure what it is. Maybe just that people who are a part of the current fb generation get more of a blur between what their past is to their present. The cynical side of me thinks that this can be problematic. i’m certainly not the same person now than i was in high school, and some of what i put into the past i want to keep in the past. Seeing how people are now after the decade gap is fine because i see them more the way they are now and how they’ve changed, so they don’t feel as much a part of my past as much as a different form and hybrid version of the present. But with people now, what happens when they change, when their lives meander down different paths and they don’t feel connected to the friends that seemed so important to them in those years? Do they defriend them on fb? ignore them?

And that’s another difference between the current internet generation versus the past non-internet generation: before, when people went their separate ways, it was more acceptable to fall out of contact simply because keeping in contact wasn’t an easy task. Now, even when people move to the other side of the world, the internet can keep them connected whether they want to or not, and there’s almost this internet social stigma, a pressure to not lose touch with people who they may only vaguely know or relate to. You defriend someone on facebook and it can cause drama and turn an anthill into a mountain. “why did she defriend me? are we not friends anymore? do i ask? what does it mean? do we no longer say hi when we pass in the hall? do i not call or invite her to a party if i come back into town visiting?” as if the concept of “friend” on facebook or LJ or anywhere in that “slice of life” paradigm actually is necessarily equivalent to a real friend.

For me, i still have a fairly clear understanding that fb is a mere touchpoint of what actual human interaction is supposed to be about. That said, i do accept it more than i used to because honestly it is kind of nice to see what people from my past are up to and how they’ve changed (or maybe it should be more accurate to say how they present themselves as changed). In the long run, though, it can still feel cheap, especially because since i’m not always the greatest at getting back to people nor sometimes being the most organized about important things, fb can make it seem like those shortcomings are amplified, and that may be somewhat true, but some of it is also sijmply that the more people i get exposed to on fb, the more my people energies can potentially get spread too thin.

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Originally posted on darkblog resonate.  I welcome any thoughts or comments there.