Thought Picnic: My Virtual Friends Are NOT Insignificant

Yes I will

Recently, I got involved in a Facebook conversation that was inspired by an article published in the Guardian titled, Should one attend the funeral of a 'virtual friend'? | Edward Collier.

The writer had found out that someone he enjoyed interacting with by reason of their mutual love of cricket had passed on. He shared how their virtual friendship had developed, his liking for his friend and the fact that he will definitely miss his friend before erring on the side of caution and his perception of social mores in deciding that he will not attend such a funeral.

I read the views expressed on the shared Facebook status and then added mine that appears below.

Virtual but not insignificant

There are many friends I have made online that I would definitely want to meet and if sadly I learnt of their passing and found that all that knew my friend were invited to attend the wake, the funeral or some memorial service, I will be there to pay my respects.

Through blogging for almost 9 years, on Twitter for 3 years and now on Facebook for over 2 years, I have connected with people who have gone the extra mile with me especially when I wrote from hospital almost 3 years ago that I had cancer and other struggles post-cancer - I got notices of support, flowers, visits, money and much more from so-called virtual friends.

Virtual they might seem but hardly insignificant, social media just provides another channel of interaction and we have to begin to recognise that it might not conform to traditional roles and norms of friendship but we relate, we communicate and some aspect of life is done with these people - just like with typical friendships, depending on depth of relationship, I will attend and hope that I have made a similar impact on them too to be willing to attend my funeral too.

Be touched and make real friends

There probably is not much else to add to this comment apart from stressing that my virtual friends are not insignificant, I have met quite a few people who started off as virtual friends and besides, I have made other friends through these virtual friends and established bonds of affinity that are just as enduring as those of traditional friendships.

It is important that we realise like I said in my comment that new ways of interaction will create new interrelationships that we can develop, grow and nurture. I believe we will be poorer for it if all we think are good friends are only the people we have physically met whilst at the same time we have literally poured our lives, our time and every valuable resource online into virtual friends and failed to make those beneficial and worthwhile.

On the strength of my comment, I made a new friend, on Facebook, we touch each other with every expression of our lives and we are enriched by actual, virtual or incidental friends. In other words, make the best of whoever you encounter and you can be assured of the best of friendships. That is my story.

Social Media Engagement: Attributes observed playing games

Another observation

Obviously, it is unscientific of based a whole set of presumptions on an experience that has hardly lasted 24 hours, but one will be hard-pressed not to draw conclusions already.

As I returned home yesterday from a lovely rendezvous with my growing circle of friends made from social media activities that included the rather usual lunch that had a fine lady exhibit her mastery of Nigerian cuisine, she not being remotely African, I reminisced about the many people I have met in person through blogging, tweeting and on Facebook.

Scrabble in motion

The train journey back to Amsterdam was uneventful until at one of the stops a passenger boarded and as he was fiddling with his phone as everyone who has a smartphone does nowadays, out of the corner of my eye I saw he was playing a game that looked like Scrabble.

A few days ago, I did a search on the Android Marketplace for Scrabble and I ended up with a word puzzle – Word Game – which had some addictive qualities working against the clock but nothing like the tradition game.

Rather than be a peeping Tom, I asked the man if the game was Scrabble, it wasn’t but it was a Scrabble clone of sorts called Wordfeud.

Handling the little things

He said he was playing multiple games using different dictionaries with friends all around that world and I thought, when I get home, I will try it out.

Wordfeud is available for use with mainly European languages on the iPhone, Android and Windows 7.5+ platforms with the programmers having the good sense to differentiate between English (US) and English (International) – they deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for just that alone.

There is a premium version that removes all advertisements whilst introducing other features. The board and game is intuitive enough and each language has a different alphabet set with weights and frequencies differing according to the selected language.

A really good imitation

It was not long before I saw the dissimilarities between Wordfeud and Scrabble, the scoring on the board is different with the premium squares allowing for more interesting play, the ratings on the latters also differ – it is amazing how much trivial information one can recall from years of playing traditional Scrabble.

It offers the basic moves as play, swap or miss with the shuffle function that allows for rearranging the letters to form new words but no penalties for wrong words, you are alerted and allowed to reply your turn. There are helpers like Wordfeud Helper and Word Fraud, yes, you can get help without your opponent knowing – such dishonesty, alarming indeed.

Tardy responsiveness

However, the reason for this blog is to highlight an interesting trait I have found which I do believe is a pervasive social media problem.

Apart from Skype calls, most interactive engagement systems are asynchronous, very much like email, you send a message and you cannot pre-determine when a response will be received. In a phone call, there is usually an unstated length of a pause before either party enquires of the other is still in that conversation – that is usually not available for Instant Messaging, Twitter, Facebook or games that are played online.

For this purpose, Wordfeud has given each player 72 hours to respond in play before that player automatically forfeits the game.

Appreciating the situation

My question is why start a game you will not conclude and why is there is no sense of commitment to complete a game you have started, albeit with strangers?

In 8 games that I have started since yesterday, only one has been completed, 2 resigned before 10 tiles had hit the board and one gave up before placing anything.

The other four have been in play for as much as 17 hours, one of which is quite near conclusion. I have decided I will rather be beaten than resign the game and I will most definitely avoid a default.

Wordfeud has options to alert, remind and prompt when it is my turn and I have switched all those options on.

The interesting thing is in a short chat session with one of the tardy, she; yes, she has a female username said she was still in the game but was simultaneously playing multiple games – in other words, I had to be patient.

I would not know if the trick is to win but drawing out the game interminably, I am however glad that Wordfeud does not allow you to resign if it is not your turn.

Playing vulture

If anything, besides the addictive qualities Wordfeud might bring to bear, it allows people to divide their attention in such a way that they are not committed, attentive or engaged to the chagrin of some.

It could also be that the players will rather default than resign or hope that the game is forgotten especially when they are performing badly in the game so as to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat – not with me.

This vulture is a patient bird and regardless of the social media construct, I will ensure I am courteous and responsive to all players that have been randomly selected – niceness should be pervasive, regardless of level of acquaintance, though, I do recognise in certain forums, some people just seek to expose your evils.

Thought Picnic: My Google+ Concerns

Google+ the new fad

The new Social Networking craze is Google+ which a lot of people are adopting and lauding as the next big thing in the online propagation of self, interest, interaction and fun.

Whilst it is a new perspective on the social networking landscape, for more practical reasons I have not found how this contributes significantly to my social networking experience yet.

I have read many reviews of the amazingly new things you can do with Google+, the circles, the hangouts, the granularity in sharing and probably it’s Facebook-killer prospects.

Carrying your users with change

My background in Information Technology is about implementing radical change in the enterprise without disrupting the business process by quantifying risk and benefit without leaving the critical business processes and users behind.

For all the amazing IT infrastructure that can be implemented in an organisation it is usually the users that are left behind and the support department left with the escalating costs of helping the users get to grips with the new environments and systems they have been presented with the IT management somewhat satisfied that the backend systems and successfully implemented and literally oblivious of the user complaints until some senior executive walks into the CIO’s office stating that the situation is untenable.

I root for the user and the many users of the organisation that make up the engine-room of the productivity gains the organisation intends to achieve by implementing any ideas or systems and it is not an easy job at all.

Exposure over experience

For instance, I remember the visual interface changes between Microsoft Office 2003 and Microsoft office 2007, whilst the later version appeared to expose the extensive usability of the product, in the process it left behind the experienced user-base of Microsoft Office products that either had to learn new ways of doing what they always knew or buying additional software that gave them the kinds of menus they were used to in earlier versions.

Eventually, Microsoft realised this that they created a usability website that allowed experienced users to put in their old ways of doing things to learn the new ways of how things are done.

I may have digressed but this is what I realised about Google+, at the moment it does not fit in into the social networking workflow that I have developed in the use of Twitter, Facebook, Blogging and Google Buzz.

Opportunity is not continuity

It does not feed into any of these environments neatly yet, though there are applications ready for that function, it does not channel any of the existing traffic nor does it aggregate any of what I do, it for now looks like a fancy gadget of excitable distraction.

I can understand that Google+ allows for people to develop the influx and categorisations of their social networking contact anew but this is at the expense of leaving behind the audience that has been built up in the various other social networking environments that have been nurtured over the years.

Whilst the connections of Twitter are asynchronous and can be managed with lists certain Twitter applications allow for the traffic to be filtered. On Facebook, fan profiles are asynchronous whilst friend profiles are synchronous, requiring acknowledgements to interact.

Multi-dimensional circles matter

With Google+ Circles linked to the Google+ Streams you can also filter your traffic but Circles are in terms monolithic, it would have been nice to have concentric circles, hierarchical trees or over-lapping circles like Venn diagrams that signify degrees of separation or closeness in terms of who you interact with and share information with because the contacts do not necessarily fall into one circle.

I probably want to put people in different circles as I determine which group of people I want to share information with like someone who is family that I can share the craziest things with that also belongs to my close circle of friends and we have similar interests and probably non-divergent career paths – clicking on that person should immediately show those relationships and hopefully what I have already disseminated.

Hard work or ease?

Another analogy can be found in the acquiring a new mobile phone; over years you build up a contact list on your mobile phone that you might occasionally prune but you would most likely want to electronically export to your new mobile phone without losing your data and its integrity.

There are terms and conditions from the various social networking platforms that might disallow the wholesale transfer of your existing user base to Google+, you find that you are manually recreating your network on Google+ which might be good for some but for others who do not need to exclude any of the existing social networking contact for being better at filtering their user base in the first instance, it becomes a chore that needs to be simplified a lot more in terms of seeing Google+ as a feeder, conduit or aggregator.

Google may not want Google+ to perform any of those functions but just like change can be a difficult process in well-established organisational structures, people might well stick with what they can use and use well retaining their user base that working in multi-various social-networking platforms that have not been usefully integrated for the user.

Hardly where it should be for the users

Google+ might well become the dominant social networking platform over time but the bridge to that seamless integration with existing social networking expression is for now a shaky rope-bridge over a river of very hungry crocodiles a la Indiana Jones.

Google Search might take the context of Google+ as a word rather than an advanced search function that concatenates the next word, I am not convinced it is the best name for this platform as it is or as words, it reminds me of software applications as Act, Clarify, Remedy, AIMS etc which were difficult to search for just because they had more predominant contexts in language than for their use as application names.

I can understand that many may not agree with my views as expressed here but I do not believe this is a concern to be dismissed out of hand, you might well want to leave your old use base behind, but if you a simple thought to your existing social networking contacts; if they are not as geeky as you are, do they want to lose contact with you and really cannot you afford to lose them just because you now have a new toy?

User-driven or developer-driven?

It is incumbent of Google to make Google+ work for you as you adapt it to your purposes with ease, it is time that the user really has a say in what software and applications should deliver rather than what the developer force feeds you just because they think they can read you mind.

Obviously, any new thinking about how to normalise the various data sets on Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn and other platforms is useful, maybe a good disruption to our monolithic considerations, it is left to the user to determine how high the price they want to pay for change in cost, time, process and usefulness.

You can join my Google+ network here.

Thought Picnic: The genius of Facebook

Facing the past happily

I was chatting to a friend I last saw over two decades ago, he was one of my best friends when we were in secondary school.

The fact is for all the keenness of my memory about so many events of my past one aspect gives me concern, that of names. I have had too many instances where I have mismatched surnames and cannot for all the familiarity I had with the same people remember that essential piece of information.

Obviously, when the name showed up as a Facebook invitation, there was instant recognition with the mental slap on the head as how I could ever forgotten ever.

Everyone is a friend or a fan

However, for all the negative uses of Facebook, when I got chatting to my friend he highlighted something about the Facebook service that should have us in gratitude to whoever thought us the idea and implemented it.

Now, I have many friends on Facebook because the basic concept of interaction is Friendship and that is between people, when dealing with an organisation, institution or some personality as a public figure their profiles offer a different mode of interaction which allows you to click on the Like button.

In essence, you befriend people you know or seek to establish some relationship with and like things, objects or people you are fans of.

This is the air travel of interaction

Before Facebook there were few services that offered the means for re-establishing contact with long lost friends, you wondered where they were, what they did, how they have changed and so on; they were memories – sometimes keen, sometimes faint but we were in terms helpless and just let time run its course.

I am on many networks and have registered on alumni management sites but none have come close to the kind of social interaction that Facebook offers to rediscover and reacquaint yourself with your past; memorably nice or downright rotten.

You do have to filter your reconnections; I refuse to allow my curiosity to know to drive me back into the arms of the dreadful nightmares of the past, they are best left latent maybe even forgotten and never rekindled, no, not for a second.

Facing a broader spectrum of your history

So, as I have written before, Facebook has brought me in contact with family and relations, some so extended and the first time I met then was on Facebook. In my 40s I am making new contact with people I went to school with in the 70s and early 80s, it is surreal.

Such opportunities never existed except at alumni reunions but with the world being an ever smaller place and people travelling even further afield than before the opportunities for live meetings are more diminished.

You make a friend on Facebook and literally all the gaps get filled at an instant depending on the information shared and people share as much information to what is primarily their circle of current and close circle of friends which gets cascaded out to others who are acquaintances and long lost contacts who have become Facebook friends.

So, what Facebook has done for the rekindling of relationships is phenomenal despite the misgivings of many, it brings you back into the broad spectrum of all the people, issues and circumstances that have defined your experiences and history; crowding them into your present and forging and future that would be interesting to control, if you can.

Facebook is no joke

Looking beyond the technology and vehicle of social networking there is something greater at play; what you choose to do with those re-established relationships is left to you and how you handle those you have never had but now have to opportunity to tend, grow and foster might well define who you might become.

For all the figures, ratings and daily interactions that range from trivia to downright serious, Facebook in its concept is a work of genius and its ultimate uses have probably not yet been imagined by those who started this amazing experiment.

If there is anything you can take from this realisation, it is that Facebook is no joke, you constantly have to ask yourself about what you share, what is private, who you are willing to meet, what you are ready to relive, if you should curb your enthusiasm and whether you really can handle what Facebook brings back to you.

Thought Picnic: C'est la vie, c'est la Facebook

Your numbers are yours

My recent blog about Facebook elicited a comment that I felt I should immediately address and draw into context.

There are probably 6.5 billion people in the world, it must be a popular place and I interact with probably not more than 5000 and that is a stretch including everyone I might have ever met.

On Facebook, there are over 500 million users; my own managed network contains a figure less than 200.

Facebook is what you make it

Facebook's popularity has no bearing on my network of friends and relations, I take out of it what is of value to me, what others do is of no particular consequence.

You make your Facebook world what you want it to be, pointless or valid; useless or useful; a waste of time or wonderful – it is a template given to you to mould to your own requirements. That is work you need to put in it, it is not handled to you bespoke and tailored to your specifications.

Off the shelf, Facebook is nothing, but once populated with your relationships, it becomes your own little Facebook corner.

C’est la vie, c’est la Facebook

There might well be a lot of fickleness on Facebook, but that is hardly what I get from those that are my real friends or those who want to engage me positively, productively and in edifying ways, I also have the option to de-friend another who comes into my space fouling up the ambience I am trying to create and maintain.

There is also a lot of fickleness in real life but you make your value judgements and gravitate towards the more wholesome interactions whilst giving little time to those who want to waste it.

Indeed, one can easily begin to look at Facebook as some phenomenon in the context of everyone there but why should that have any bearing on your particular circle of relationships, you are not everyone and everyone is not you.

My own little Facebook world

I do not link initiate link-ups with people I hardly know, I am interested in being seen in the social circle of presidents, CEOs or gurus of snake-oil remedies for life, which is not what Facebook is for in my view.

With Facebook, I have re-established contact with long lost friends, relations, people and situations, just as I have established contact with like-minded people I would never have met in other circumstances – just as airplanes have made the world a smaller place through making travel easy and fast, Facebook allows you to create a more global community for sharing views and ideas, engendering discussion and useful conversation.

Online networks are part of you today

I have seen great value in my many networks, through LinkedIn that has helped me professional, my blogs where people have followed my thoughts and views or even empathised with me in very trying times, on Twitter where a quip or thought just crystallises a situation and could generate interesting interactions and now Facebook where management and control is very much in your hands to work it effectively or mismanage it and consequently it yields no pleasure.

Now, my view of Facebook and my Facebook personality cannot be extrapolated to help people see it the way I see it, I am just having fun with it, I hope everyone else can have just as much fun.

Humanity is being expressed in person and online, the train is leaving town, even if you do not have a ticket, you should be on that train.

Thought Picnic: It is happening on Facebook

It is happening on Facebook

There is a discussion happening on Facebook that you have to be a part of, in fact, there are many discussions that do not appear on blogs, on Twitter or in the news but it is wholesome, interesting and engaging.

I joined Facebook just over a year ago after years of taking the media reviews of it being fickle, feckless and hardly rewarding.

More so, we are told it is inherently evil, every missing person, abused person or unfortunate victim of crimes, some as heinous as rape or murder appears to have some Facebook assailant.

You manage your Facebook

The problem is really not Facebook, you can have as many friends as you want on Facebook; a good many you will know from all walks of life and others would just latch onto you, however, you can clearly choose what you want to share and with whom, primarily by making lists and managing permissions to your content by lists.

Very personal and private information should only be shared with those you know, in fact, the people you really know probably have other means of contacting you and it is best to use those channels than Facebook messaging.

If you properly compartmentalise the wealth of information you share on Facebook, distinguishing between the groups of people you meet just as you do not get too familiar with strange and unfamiliar people in real life, you should be generally safe.

You manage your Facebook, do not let it manage you, you have the right to click Cancel, click No, click Ignore, click Later, you do not have to click OK, Proceed, Accept, Allow – DO NOT feel compelled to do anything and do not let your curiosity get the better of you; you can wait until you have acquired more knowledge about a setting or situation before proceeding – a simple Google search could give you a general risk profile of the option.

Boxing your friends

The groups you can manage range from parents – these might include other relations with whom certain levels of openness have not been established; relations – these might be cousins and many others removed who you have grown to know through the relationships established through your parents.

Friends – you probably want to separate your current friends from those you have long lost contact with and these might well be different from another group or supposed friends; ex-schoolmates – ranging from those you met in primary school who would be quite different from those you met in secondary school and ultimately different from those you met in college or university.

Each set of friends probably know different things about you and you either want them to collide or you manage their access to your details.

There are levels of granularity of access to information that Facebook offers from who can see what like your birthday and age, who can send you messages, you can update your statuses, where you want to get notifications from and so on.

Acquaintances may be fans not friends

You do have to take your time to put the people in your life in the right context of relationship they have with you, you will probably be uncomfortable with people you barely know being all too familiar with you and that brings us to another group of Facebook befrienders – acquaintances – people you hardly know but have networked themselves to you through other contacts; if in doubt, ignore them, if you must do due diligence, ask one of your other closer friends about them.

You can also acquire friends through their interest in what you have been saying on Facebook and since it is difficult to make the distinction of those being fans rather than your friends, they are probably the ones you do not want to share your photo albums with and other intimate information you have shared on Facebook.

Keep true but manage it

Facebook has a tendency to draw out all your interests, likes and peeves than create relationships borne of those choices, just remember that everything you put in Facebook becomes a reference data point for analysis and suggestion – in most cases; you probably do not want to put those things online.

Obviously, you do not want to be an Internet schizophrenic, you want to maintain one true identity about yourself based on fact and truth or else you are left with the unmanageable portfolio of lies told to different people at different times with the impossibility of keeping track of who have been give what information and when.

Think about if you are being extrovert, an exhibitionist or a subject for voyeurism; think about why you are sharing what you are sharing and with whom; think about retaining a bit of mystery about yourself – think about the situation where your history is in the mouth and words of others completely out of your control, think about the need to be a bit reserved and exercising some discretion and Facebook could be great fun rather than a tragedy waiting to happen.

Get on Facebook but you do not have to join the bandwagon or be part of the crowd, make it unique and culture it well.

Do you still Facebook from there?

Be my friend

An invitation to become a Facebook friend arrived the other day to one of my many email addresses not registered with Facebook, so this time I decided to add that address and another one to my profile just to get a view of the invitations I have once before ignored in trying to compartmentalise the different aspects of my life.

I learnt a bit late that Facebook was meant for friends in a social sense and LinkedIn for those from a professional life; that distinction is a bit clearer now, but I have made a few more friends on Facebook for the fact of being a tad opinionated.

We’ve been waiting for you

On the first email address, there were 6 pending invitations, including the one that prompted this amalgamation of email personalities. As I accepted the first, I saw a familiar name.

In fact, he had invited me on Facebook years ago when I was quite shy of the phenomenon; besides, our friendship had been on and off for years, so I never really got the opportunity to renew the acquaintance.

So, here I was given the opportunity to become friends again, and I would have jumped at it, and I hoped and wished that was really possible.

Do you still Facebook?

He hadn’t updated his status for a while, but that did mean there was no traffic on his page, birthday greetings, invitations to events, jokes and the kind of fare that makes Facebook what it is.

The most interesting one was a message of regret about not being able to attend a very important function arranged in honour of my friend, eerily, his burial.

I could at least confirm exactly when he died and that he was well loved by all of us who had the pleasure of his company – he remains a friend on Facebook and a fond memory.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself, am I ready for Facebook? The more bizarre question being, do you still Facebook from there?

Beware of deceptive LinkedIn recommendations

Professional social networking

LinkedIn* is more or less the professional networking site that allows for people to keep tabs with people one has somewhat interacted with in professional life.

For a person who has been self-employed most of my working life and has worked in many organisations, LinkedIn offers a forum to keep tabs with people I have worked with and also allows one to keep abreast of the careers of those same people.

Most recently, I tapped this professional network for job opportunities after having been out of work for almost a year and that mostly due to serious illness. I was glad to find that many of my ex-colleagues responded with sympathy and help which eventually lead to a job.

Self-referencing resource

I have also found that the LinkedIn profile can serve as an adjunct to a curriculum vitae (CV) because it can contain information that would not necessarily appear on a CV for instance, it can be a self-referencing portal if an employer reviews the profile finds people you have worked with and probably knows those people or organisations and make qualified assumptions or deductions of the prospect.

A slightly more subjective but useful function in LinkedIn is the recommendation feature, it can be interesting and indicative of the views ex-colleagues have of a person, hence, it is important that the writer and recipient pay particular attention to the construction, content, context, intent and import of the recommendation.

The recipient is given the opportunity to edit and recommend to the writer changes that would reflect better in order not to have the opinions misconstrued by other readers.

Understand before acceptance

Where English is used but not the mother-tongue, it is even more pertinent that the matter be reviewed by an English speaker before publication. I have at least in a number of cases had to decline recommendations that were subject to unfavourable interpretation even though the intentions were noble and generous – such however should not be enough to allow a recommendation or it would be the equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot.

I was completely mortified when I read a recommendation posted on a LinkedIn profile, I was half persuaded to highlight that the intention and the meaning were at complete variance. However, on reflection, the writer might well have meant what he wrote and the recipient none the wiser about the nuances and pitfalls of the gentle English putdown has proudly published this damning assessment of abilities sandwiched in passable praise.

The short recommendation

“Person is a great consultant with a lot of knowledge from everything. Doesn't bother helping you with all sort of things. Really a great team worker and a nice colleague.”

Three short sentences that speak volumes that are either lost in translation from a Dutch context or are a good excuse to use language as a deficiency to castigate in the most unfair light.

Person is a great consultant with a lot of knowledge from of everything. Either way, the knowledge from or more correctly, the knowledge of everything could easily read as a Jack of all trades and a master of none. The more charitable turn of phrase would probably have been a very broad knowledge of technical concepts – giving it a more specific frame of context. Whilst Dutch allows for verbosity and generalisations that could be easily contextualised, English is not that forgiving.

Does he bother or does he mind?

Doesn't bother helping you with all sort of things. This is the damning part because it reads like he doesn’t mind helping you in every way but it says he is the most unhelpful person you can find regardless of the situation presented to him.

It might be that the writer thought bother was synonymous with mind; in some contexts ‘Are you bothered?’ or ‘Do you mind?’ could be interchangeable but definitely not here. With Google Translate to Dutch the meaning did not carry as well until I modified the sentence to read as “He doesn't bother helping you with all sort of things.”

Dutch requires that the object and subject are very explicit in a sentence, it is not that good with implicit references and so this passed the censorship of the recipient when it should not have gone any further.

Can he really be?

Really a great team worker and a nice colleague. This would leave one almost wondering what the writer was trying to say after the first two sentences and it might well allow one to consider the possibility of a Freudian slip. Malevolently, this was the sweetener to the bait, obfuscating the intentions in the second sentence.

You might call it pedantic but recommendations are read with a greater attention to the detail rather than the general idea of what the writer is trying to convey – this recommendation has in my opinion torn the professional reputation of an otherwise knowledgeable and great consultant who is a nice colleague to shreds.

To think this recommendation has been published for over 2 years might well mean the damage is already done.

As for my opinions of the recipient, I could not possibly comment any further. The advice is, never accept wholesale a recommendation you do not fully understand and comprehend regardless of the good intentions of the benevolent writer.

* LinkedIn - Wikipedia

Tapping my network for work

Tapping my network

Over 20 years of work experience, I have done many things and worked with people. Today, I decided to tap on the network of people I have met in my working life and ask for their assistance in finding a job.

Some of them I have not spoken to in a very long time, but somehow, I felt seeing my message might remind them of their experiences of my expertise, work ethic and abilities and hopefully, they might just rekindle that with offering me a job or recommending me to other recruiters in their network.

The text of the letter follows and I just thought, if I could not use my professional contacts, my blog, my social networks and any other connections to find work too, what are those networks for if they are not also part of life itself?

The letter

I have overcome adversity and now I seek opportunity, opportunities I hope and believe you all as ex-colleagues at work or at school, who I have worked for, worked with or helped at work can offer – I address you all.

I do have an extensive curriculum vitae but that only contains some basic truths of my work experience and maybe what I have achieved before, I definitely cannot put in another section talking about how I fought cancer or how you liked or hated working with me, those are life experiences of a different significance.

However, having come out of that situation, I need to get back to work and want to get back to work – I am speculating and hoping that with the recall of experiences you have had working with me you can help me with assignments or know people who have assignments that you believe I can tackle with the ability, expertise and professionalism you remember me for.

I know this is an unusual message to send to you all but if I cannot tap on the wonderful experiences and network I have had in the last 20 years in this critical but necessary time, then I might have failed to have any impact in all the workplaces where I have been given the opportunity to work, serve and maybe change for the better, all with your help.

I have attached my resume [My LinkedIn Profile here] for your perusal and hope that very soon occasion will warrant being at your service again, I can also be contacted on number provided.

Thank you and the very kindest of regards,

Yours faithfully,

Akin Akintayo

So, all I have to do now is wait and I will keep you posted as to how it all turned out.

Are you ready for Facebook?

Afraid to suck

For years, I had a public presence on the Internet in professional forums and through a blog that has been running for over 6 years.

In fact, I dabbled at creating a personal homepage which went online with Compuserve in 1994 but in the process of designing the page I came across a website which was titled “Web pages that suck” with the byline of teaching you good page design from looking at bad examples.

It did not take long for me to realise that I was not some quintessential artist and my dabbling was on for a great mockery – I pulled down everything despite my long acquaintance with professional desktop publishing.

Facing the book

In all that time, I heard of the social networking sites as they evolved, but never thought much of those connections, I dared to join Twitter early last year as a micro-blogging forum but Facebook was off my radar.

It was one of my ex-colleagues who persuaded me to look into Facebook in December and since then it has been an experience.

Memories are recalled, histories replayed and long lost contacts and relationships are getting restored, some too sudden and others just about comfortable with the rush of emotions it entails.

The past revived

At the risk of becoming an emotional wreck, just one message came through and one link lead to another and my life 20 years ago was being reconstructed with ever brick falling in place, every aspiration rekindled anew, every old thought almost becoming a haunting and every smell recreating the atmosphere that had almost become a fossil of memory.

There is no telling that the kids of those days are now well into parenting whilst the parents might soon be great-grandparents – time changes, time transforms, time ages and the observer of time appears to stand still looking through the hub to the circle of timely and untimely milestones.

Are you ready?

Facebook becomes more than facing the book, you are facing the facts, facing the truths, facing the lies, facing the realities and facing the mirages – castles with moats and castles in the air – can one really assimilate all that information and remain anything like sane?

Has anyone really stopped to consider where their Facebook will take them today and are they ready to go on that journey of undiscovered connections which might well unearth things that should have been left buried if we dared to resist the peer pressure of having the book thrown in our faces?

Mixed emotions all, happy and sad, grateful and rueful, considered and inconsiderate, glad and envious – a turmoil of butterflies in the stomach and excited anticipation – you really do wonder – are you really ready for the force of Facebook?

Twitter and my other social networks

Online on long

For someone who first went online some 15 years ago with a CompuServe [1] account and having been online literally non-stop since June 2000, I am not particularly enamoured by the many social networking fads and there are quite a few.

I started blogging over 5 and half years ago and did because I felt I ruminated a lot about events and issues around me but never really have a forum in which to express myself or air my views.

Probably, I should have been political, but after a brutal encounter with student union politics where the authorities interfered with anyone who dared have independent thoughts, I felt the game was just too dirty for my sensibilities – however, when I did politics, people knew I was in politics that was 25 years ago.

Links to strange places

There are so many social networks they are as comforting as a scratch to a rash, but one does really wonder what real purpose they serve, but each to their own.

The only mainstream social networking site I am registered to is LinkedIn [2], this is a professional setting for networking with people you have associated with in your career.

As I entered details of my work life, I began to make connections with people I had worked with over the years, we commended and recommended each other based on memories of our experiences and before you know it, you have a self-referencing career profile.

Someone comes across your LinkedIn profile and finds that you are connected to other well known persons, that can be taken at face value or more inquiries can be made – before you know it, you are connected if not working through the connections made within the LinkedIn network.

Though, I have not yet secured an opportunity yet with LinkedIn, I know as a self-employed consultant that in the last 10 years, all projects I have been on have come about through undocumented networks, LinkedIn in my view can take that further sometime in the future, I think.

A commitment to Blogs flagging

Blogs can be difficult to write and it could take time to incubate and then appear as an opinion, I have held issues for months at times before I felt the time was ripe to write with inspired fervour.

Somehow, my blogs are not short, they are fully referenced, attributed and painstakingly researched, well, I try, it might not be as thorough as one would like it but my write-ups are not academic treatises.

The advent of Twitter [3] has somehow changed my blogging perspective, as system whereby you condense a topic, a reference and your opinion into 140 characters must test anyone’s abilities in concision, precision, brevity and context, you bet, mine have been tested.

I have been quite a purist about Short Message Service (SMS) messages, I hate abbreviations and what is known as SMS English, I once received such a message from my kid sister, I politely told her I could not understand what she had written – it took my mother transcribing it to traditional English for the penny to drop.

The Twitter spirit is fabulous

Anyway, I do like Twitter, it makes you think about how to put it all together in one Tweet making allowances for a reply or a ReTweet. This means you Tweet must be at least 2 characters plus your Tweeter identity short of 140 characters. Sometimes, you have to rephrase a Tweet and still maintain the original context, but I wonder what this would make of communication.

Would we all become masters of the soundbite, earnest purveyors of the dramatic put-down or scribblers of putative one-liners?

I am not sure that Twitter would radically affect the seeming verbosity of my blogs but this outlet is very useful; in 140 characters, I could be serious, silly, salacious, sceptical, sanguine, sarcastic, probably scandalous but never seditious.

A toolbox of Twitter spanners

Beyond that, Twitter came in useful when I found myself the only passenger on a boat, I sent a Tweet announcing where I was and one announcing my arrival on terra firma – it offers public insurance with private assurance.

There are so many Twitter tools out there but I have selected three for their ease of use, basic functionality and follower management capabilities.

I use the PowerTwitter Add-on to Firefox [4], it automatically expands the shortened URL to the source and shows pictures and video links if the short URL points to those elements. I can immediately see who I am following and who is following me.

My Swiss-Army Twitter knife

Twhirl [5] is easy and portable, the reply, ReTweet, favourite and direct message icons are available when the mouse is moved over the image of the Tweeter. I use the http://is.gd URL shortener because it gives the shortest URL and only this weekend the sequentially generated part moved up from 4 characters to 5 characters.

Then suddenly I got all this following from lewd profiles, those I did block but I also ended up blocking some profiles I should have just stopped following – I found out how to better work the system over time.

Just like my blogs the general theme of my Tweets is also about things too concerning to ignore, so really, I am not interesting in some other get-rich- quick Internet money making idea – if the ideas were so good, the purveyors of such Twitter Spam would be serial entrepreneurs making money not part of the nuisance of online noise.

Between friends, acquaintances and hobos

Just like I learnt with ICQ over 10 years ago, in the first day, I was connected to 50 people who did not say more than “Hello”, I was so clueless about who they were, what their interests were and they had not bothered to fill in their profiles. I cleaned out everything and ended up with just 5 connections. The same logic has applied to all my other networks, I engage with people who engage me because there is no point taking traffic you cannot use. It is already a jungle out there.

So, this is where Tweepular [6] came in useful, it shows mutual follows, unrequited follows and followers – in fact, it is a crude tool I use every other day based on the last time a Tweet was published and the content of that last Tweet to decide whether to follow or not – so that the point in time when I check Tweepular my decision is a hammer and that momentary Tweet is a nail.

The developers of Tweepular are such fun loving crazy people, as it generates your data the progress bar has the Twitter bird moonwalking – makes me smile everytime.

What I would like

I would like to see a proper reference to Tweets I have replied to so the thread is consistent and if necessary one should be able to easy expose a thread to public viewing.

I have published my Tweets on my blog, on the left there is a full-colour Flash based record of recent Tweets and to the bottom right of my blog, you can find a list of my last 50 Tweets.

Tweepular intends to create a feature to show Recent Unfollowers, but really, are we that bothered? In the end, the ideal TwitterVerse is to be followed by just the same people you want to follow, we would never get that ideal but people are getting on my list the more their one-liners have content, context, sense and probably some humour too.

I am not on FaceBook, I am just not persuaded of its usefulness at all and Flickr handles my photographs efficiently, in fact, I have had a few published in forums, guides and journals.

Sources

[1] CompuServe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[2] LinkedIn Home

[3] Twitter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[4] Power Twitter : Add-ons for Firefox

[5] twhirl | the social software client

[6] Tweepular Login