LinkedIn vs BeKnown – Integrating Social Networks

Monster, the job search website has launched a Facebook app called BeKnown – the primary idea is to corral your friends and your co-workers into separate categories in Facebook. I am wondering about how this will work, and how LinkedIn fits into the whole picture. I need to explore it a bit to find my answers. But the fact that Monster has launched BeKnown is in itself proof of one of the issues many of us are contending with in social networking. Who is a friend? Who is an acquaintance? Who is a co-worker? Who is a potential client? And how do we balance all these audiences in one setting?

I think it is safe to say that once you start seeing 100 and 200 in people friends’ list, we have well and truly passed the bosom buddies stage. I have friends from grade school, whom I have not seen is several decades, and people whom I have met in the last six months all in the same space. While FB privacy setting does allow me to decide who gets to see what, I find that it is not always easy to execute privacy settings. Somebody actually wrote to ask me why they could not see my friends’ comments! So much for subtle filtering.

This leaves me struggling with the question of how to manage multiple interest groups. It takes some thought and effort to balance out my professional and personal network and I must admit that it leads to some self-censoring. While this is not all bad, I wonder whether this reduces the impact of my social networks. I remember a blog which was Freshly Pressed a little while ago recommending that we should just integrate all our social networks – bring together LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and all the works! That has not been an easy choice for me and today’s app news from Monster is confirmation that it is not a viable choice for many of us. I think some boundaries are still warranted, and until we figure out the networking niceties we will continue to explore firewalls.

How do you handle your social networks? Do they overlap or are they fully integrated? Do you worry about boring your family with work related links or do you fret about distant colleagues getting to know your family details? Do you find such privacy questions amusing? I am curious to know how others handle the tug-of-war between the public vs private….

Warner, Stein and Literary Spaces

So many interesting developments and discoveries – I hope I get to explore in detail at least some of what came by my path this week. I hope you get to investigate some of these places, articles, thoughts, concepts and what have you…here is this week’s smorgasbord.

Image courtesy of Matador Network

Lovely Libraries: Does the sight of rows of books give your goosebumps? Do you go into raptures when you enter beautiful libraries and book stores. You will enjoy this phot0 essay in Matador Network on the Amazing Libraries of the World. This essay is not from the last week but this is information that surpasses time and I wanted to share the joy of these inspiring literary spaces.

Facebook for Films?: Warner Bros has started a program to use Facebook for renting movies. The payment will be via Facebook currency which has so far been used mainly for online games. This experiment may well re-orient the way we think of online entertainment, e-commerce and F-commerce! It is an app for Facebook developed by Warner and may well be indicative of the path forward for Hollywood studios.

Image courtesy of Time Magazine

What kind of online profile do you really have?: Time Magazine has a thought-provoking cover story by Joel Stein in the March 25th edition. We spend thought and effort creating our public profiles on various social media sites. But is that all the world sees of us? The data that is mined from sites we visit and things we buy offer advertisers a real insight into who we are. The profile that emerges can seem very invasive in that everything, from what we like to eat to which side of the bed we sleep on, can be part of our data profile. Stein makes the interesting point though that advertisers are not really interested in getting to know us as individuals. They are only interested in bits and pieces as it can be used for targeted advertising. Do you like sports? Here are some tickets that may interest you. Do you enjoy good deals? Here are some coupons that you may like to buy. Stein uses his inimitable style to explore the idea of privacy in the age of social media. The data mining companies may have our most private information but they are not really interested in the whole person behind it all. So, ultimately it is nothing personal!