Social Networking

January 26, 2009 at 1:29 pm (Uncategorized)

I confess, I’m a social networker. Primarily because I’m quite lazy when it comes to keeping in touch with friends – email takes a looong time, and texting is nice but not quite enough space and costs money. Facebook is an option that means I can be extremely nosy at what my mates are up to, and send little messages so that they can see what I’m up to too 🙂 There is a particular aspect of Facebook that I both love and loath… Applications. At first I just added them as people requested them, partly because I was curious, and partly because I was worried people would be offended if I didn’t. Then I got really fed up of them! There are so many, most of them suggesting you log in every 5 mins in order to make the most of them, and with the old fascia of Facebook they ate the screen up everywhere. Now I’m a bit more picky. But if you are new or haven’t found it yet there is a particular app with a rude word in it which I will change accordingly – ‘Rubbish’ Gifts for Academics 🙂 Lynn, Graham and I have already had quite a bit of fun with it… 😀 Sadly I haven’t yet wished anyone Happy New Year or Merry Christmas. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think it 😉 although I might sent you yarn… Mmmmmmmm free yarn…

I know Facebook can be a very useful commercial tool for companies and institutions to keep in touch with their clients, and that we have a presence on Facebook for the various sites, but frankly I think the student led ones are more popular because they don’t worry about posting any old stuff on their own groups, whereas if we start one, we are probably just old fogies or something and will be watching their every move… However, for some reason, Barnsley’s group is pretty popular while CLS is a bit, well, less popular. Personally I think it is down to BA being a smaller site, so they end up getting to know the students better. But still, not really sure what we could do to encourage people to sign up for the CLS one, other than maybe adding a popup to the desktop or email in student notices.

Ok, now I’ve spent some time on Facebook for work purposes (and anyone viewing my status will discover!), it is time to look at microblogging. I’m a Plurker rather than a Tweeter (although at the mo I’m tempted to swap). I like microblogging, to a certain extent. Strangely I feel more pressure to be interesting in microblogging than I do in normal blogging. I can’t see myself posting about some of the stuff mentioned in the video, but I do like being able to follow other people. They seem to be more personal posts than in blogging (e.g X feels that something is quite good/someone is a pain in the backside), which is nice. But at the same time, getting requests to follow or friend you is like Facebook – freaky if you don’t know the person.

Having read a bit more about Twitter, I’d be tempted to migrate there if only to read Stephen Fry’s updates. Twittervision is kind of hypnotic too – you could easily lose yourself in reading about other people’s exploits. And when Courtney Cox confesses that she wants to know about other celebs the way people want to be nosy about her, then what hope do I have for avoiding being nosy about other people? 😀

Edited to add: interesting article on BBC News website on Tweeting 😀