Facebook, Ning, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, ... *sigh* ... not to mention all the other sites I have joined and later abandoned.
Frankly, I have FAR too many communities of virtual friends at the moment, but each site has a unique culture and purpose, and therefore houses a unique set of my contacts, so it's impossible to amalgamate them into one place. For example, on facebook I only friend people I actually know (the site culture seems to encourage identity honesty). It is currently a mix of current/past friends, colleague/librarian-friends, and university/high school friends. On MySpace I had hundreds of "friends", none of whom I knew in any other context (the site culture seems to encourage anonymity) and for many of whom I could not understand their motivation for "friending" me. So I deleted my profile a few months ago. My parents are flickr and YouTube friends. On Ning my friends are presumably librarians interested in Web2.0 (otherwise, why would they be part of the community), but I don't know any of them in person.
Speaking of anonymity ... when I was in job search mode and trying to demonstrate my proficieny with "emerging technologies" I chose to use my real name. It paid off. A number of my interviewers had googled my name and found traces of my 2.0 activities. Now that I am settled in a job I have started to tighten up the privacy settings and change my display names. Hopefully in a few months I will become a bit more elusive to the Google stalkers.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
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2 comments:
Hey Alison - Not to sound too much like a "Google stalker," but I think you likely mean elusive here rather than illusive. Not to be confused with my favourite, allusive! Back to my delightful paper,
Mary Kate, your mostly virtual friend (but it needn't be that way)
Thank you for the editorial service Mary Kate! Indeed elusive was what I meant :)
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