Social Media | Web Training Wheels

Facebook’s New News Feed

Today Facebook made a strange update to their otherwise functional News Feed feature. You can read all the details at ReadWriteWeb where Marshall breaks down the changes excellently. I ended up posting a pretty lengthy comment over there so I decided to turn it into a blog post!

My personal opinion on the change is that it’s unnecessary and doesn’t add anything useful.

Since I have about 800 friends on my Facebook profile, I utilize Friend Lists to organize them (my real life friends, professional contacts etc) and can filter my News Feed according to those groups. It works nicely and allows me to see the information I choose according to my own criteria. And when I want to see general updates from all my friends, I look at the main News Feed. Lovely.

What We Can Learn From The T-Mobile Mess

As you may have heard, earlier this week, some of T-Mobile’s Sidekick users were told that some of their personal data and content, which was hosted by Microsoft on their servers in ‘the cloud’, was irretrievably lost – gone, kaput. Yikes! So what can we all learn from the misfortune of those livid Sidekick users?

‘The cloud’ is not failsafe!

Lately there’s been so much talk about how ‘the cloud’ is the future of computing. Even if that term is new to you, chances are you’ve been using ‘the cloud.’ Have a video hosted on YouTube? Your spreadsheet on Google Docs? That’s ‘the cloud’ – content and data that is stored somewhere ‘out there’ other than on your own servers.
It’s been easy for us to be convinced that ‘cloud’ computing is the ultimate way to store our data – it’s easy, it doesn’t cost us resources, and most of the time it works perfectly. But this fuzzy notion, embodied in the very name ‘the cloud’, of some almighty techie in the sky manning our information is part of the problem. We haven’t stopped to think what the consequences could be. It’s 2am, do you know where your data is and who’s taking care of it?!

What’s The Point of Social Media?

A more personal take on what you can get out of social media…

1) Self-expression

For me, this is the Main Point. Everything else listed here is essentially a subdivision of this overarching concept. Social media gives you any number of outlets through which you can reveal aspects of yourself through the information you choose to share, how you choose to help others, opinions you express and the communities you choose to participate in. Social media empowers your self-expression by giving you instant access to a targeted community of your choice where you can find validation, maybe constructive criticism, inspiration, food for thought and overall stimulation. As you participate in social media, your ability to self-express will grow and this is an empowering process in itself.

9 Time Management Tips For Social Media

One of the most prominent barriers to social media engagement is “I just don’t have time” or even “[insert social site here] is just a waste of time.”

Agreed, Twitter, Facebook and the like CAN be huge time-sucks and the line between time-suckage and utility is a very fine one that requires a lot of monitoring and self-discipline. Social media can be overwhelming and it’s all too easy to just start clicking on people’s profiles, following links to blog posts and generally getting lost in the maze of the interweb. Before you know it you’ve wasted 30 minutes and not done anything productive. However, once you are able to get past the time-waste factor, you can begin to see the benefits of being involved. I hope these tips will provide some practical methods to optimize your engagement.