A nice article in PCWorld today offers some tips for managing your Google Buzz account, including how to keep buzz out of your inbox, which is nice because I don’t want an e-mail reminder every time someone interacts with me on a social network. So far, I’m just not sure I know what all the “buzz” is about (wow, what’s with new technology names spawning so many bad puns lately?). I know what Google Buzz is supposed to do in principle, but in these early stages, it’s far from it.
Earlier this week I mentioned that I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the presence of social media in my life, as Twitter, foursquare and LinkedIn are all recent additions to my online persona. Facebook remains my largest social network, which makes sense because I’ve been building it for nearly four years. I have a small following on Twitter, which overlaps largely (but not entirely) with my Facebook friends. Get to foursquare, and the list narrows even futher – only a handful of my friends are playing.
Of all the social networking sites, I give mad props to LinkedIn for making it easy to build your network. I signed up during #jenclass earlier this week, and two days later, I had nearly as many LinkedIn connections as I did Twitter followers (I’ve been tweeting for two months). Perhaps its the ubiquity of using LinkedIn to build your resume online, but I sure got a lot of hits when I let it have at my Google address book… a lot more than when I let Twitter steer.
(Google Buzz automatically imports contacts from people I’ve interacted with via e-mail, which I feel is a little presumptuous. I don’t want every student that’s ever complained about the class I TA for to interact with me on a social network.)
But with so many social network destinations, I’m finding myself at a loss as to what to say and when. Clearly, pictures of my dog belong on Facebook, but then there’s the tweet I used to send every Tuesday afternoon: “Anchoring @KBIA.” Before I joined Twitter, I’d update my Facebook status to “Club KBIA” (note the difference in tone). If I’m checking into KBIA on foursquare, does that leave room for a 16-character burst on Twitter? What about Facebook? I used to abhor the people who posted every Twitter status update to Facebook – sometimes 20 or 30 times a day. I certainly don’t want to be one of those people.
A simple fix is to use these social networks to appeal to different audiences. This works well enough for some and is currently how I manage the chaos, using Facebook to connect with non-journo friends (yes, I do have two), Twitter for self-promotion, LinkedIn for professional development, etc. But do you tell the well-meaning colleague who wants to connect on Facebook that you’d rather not, because that’s where you post photos of Fido and share texts from last night with friends? No, you triple-sanitize your profile, check your privacy settings and add them. Let your social networks overlap where they may, you say. But I don’t like this solution.
Here’s why: one of the beautiful things about Facebook (you know, the era of Facebook before Farmville, when only college students could join) was the fact that everyone was on it. You could tell people there was a study party in your dorm room in 20 minutes, and you’d get a handful of people to show up every time. In this regard, Facebook acted like an early form of location-based social networking, though it emerged out of necessity and predated most mobile geolocation devices. Now there are Twefestivals and other planned meet-ups of location-specific social network users that mimic these early days of Facebook. It would be great if you could use foursquare to plan a night out, since that’s what it encourages, but there are too few adopters in a town the size of Columbia to yet make it feasible.
Which brings me to my next point: density. There are so many social networks to chose from, that it’s difficult to decide how to divide your time and energy. For many people, I think it comes down to having one or two primary networks and letting the rest slide. Pay equal attention to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, foursquare and you’ll find yourself neglecting your real leaf social network. But if you decide you’ll tweet regularly but only log into Facebook once a week, you’re missing chances to connect with people who use it as their primary network. Although Facebook is on the decline with my fellow journalism students, it remains popular with my friends who go to school elsewhere. Do I risk losing them because I don’t check in as regularly as other members of our old group of friends? When we tried to set up a wave earlier this week in Jen’s class, it was difficult because not everyone had been invited to the Google collaboration tool yet. Although the problem was easy enough to remedy with invites, it does leave us with important questions about what happens when people are unable or unwilling to join a particular network.
What we need is a single social network with lists and settings and tools that help you organize your life into neat little categories. ”But wait!” you say. ”There are already tools to help us organize our existing social networks!” Not good enough. I need away to reach out to my peers, my professors, my friends, my family and my grandmother, and I’m not sold on the idea of separate messages on each network. Maybe this is where Google Buzz will come in, when enough users have adopted it… though it only took about 12 hours before one of my friends was asking how to block other users in Buzz. My initial reactions to the service, I’m afraid, just haven’t been positive.
We’re about to enter social network sensory overload, and some interesting decisions are ahead regarding how we conduct our virtual affairs.