11 ms·

I've stayed away simply because of the inevitable overlap between my personal and professional lives. For each online presence, I decide if it will be professi

by rm-rf 16y ago

I've stayed away simply because of the inevitable overlap between my personal and professional lives. For each online presence, I decide if it will be professional or personal, and then try to make sure they don't overlap. Some things are fairly easy to separate: Linkedin professionally, Flickr for personal photos. Nobody at work knows who I am on Flickr, so I'm free to post whatever I want w/o affecting me professionally. If I'm job hunting, the prospective employer will not associate my weird photography style with my professional qualifications. FB pretty much assures that I'll end up with friends, family and work mixed together.

mikeryan 16y ago
I tried to keep linkedin and facebook private but once a client (who I'm friends with) friended me it made my facebook pretty damn vanilla, and its stayed that way as I've added other professional friends. Now I don't even worry about it I just don't put stuff out on facebook that reveals much. I mostly just lurk and post something I think is funny but not too racy. So I'm on facebook but I'm not worried about anything "getting out" because I don't have anything to hide in that zoo. I've been more tempted to say things that are revealing in this forum but since I use my real name it makes me keep things pretty tight - I'm not going to post anything too offensive. Again - I'm okay with that. In a way I've sacrificed being able to say some things I might later regret. But then again I'm not saying things on teh interwebs that I might regret.
- metamemetics 16y ago
  >but once a client (who I'm friends with) friended me it made my facebook pretty damn vanilla, and its stayed that way as I've added other professional friends. This is a usability problem with facebook. It should be easy as pie to control the information you present to different GROUPS of people. Instead functionality is scattered across by CONTENT TYPE. Makes no sense and is completely illogical, social networking is about people, differing content-types are just small variations on the sharing theme and not the main conceptual focus. The 100 different content types are the entity sets with privacy attributes, rather than having privacy be an attribute on a manually created (small) number of groups of people. We put people in groups (ie. professional, family, friends) in real life, I can't understand how Facebook can possibly get this so wrong. The root of these problems is piss poor User Interface decisions. Facebook expanded without a plan. It's just like Urban Sprawl: let's add a bunch of widgets everywhere just like a suburb with zero urban planning adds strips malls.
patrickaljord 16y ago
> I've stayed away simply because of the inevitable overlap between my personal and professional lives. You can can create simple work/family/etc lists of friends and when you post something you choose who gets it. In some ways, you do pick a recipient whenever you send an email, so it's not like you're not used to having to pick a recipient when posting something on the web. Facebook makes it pretty easy every time you post a status to choose the list of people, or a black list, or white list or even pick the people one by one that will be able to read your post, same as with emails.
- mbreese 16y ago
  Yeah, but it can be pretty easy to click the wrong list or send something to the wrong list. It is too easy to make a mistake. Plus, what happens if someone else tags you in the college picture of you doing a keg stand? That's not something you have any control over and yet something that you may not want potential employers to see.
  - piguy314 16y ago
    I have all my work contacts blacklisted from seeing photos I'm tagged in.
  - patrickaljord 16y ago
    > Yeah, but it can be pretty easy to click the wrong list or send something to the wrong list. So does that mean you never use email either? > Plus, what happens if someone else tags you in the college picture of you doing a keg stand? That's not something you have any control over and yet something that you may not want potential employers to see. Actually, you can prevent people from tagging you. Also, if someone has a picture of you doing a keg stand and puts it on the internet, you're pretty much screwed, facebook or not.
    - rm-rf 16y ago
      >So does that mean you never use email either? No, But it does mean that I use separate e-mail accounts on separate systems for each social realm. My professional, personal and 'internet' presences are divided up between my ISP, GMail, Yahoo & Microsoft, as are my on line photos, blog comments, blogs, address books, etc. > if someone has a picture of you doing a keg stand I think that depends on the context. If they post the picture along with my name and enough of my address/phone number to identify me and associate the photo with the resume that my prospective employer had, then yes, I'm screwed. That's why I make deals with my friends -- you don't post pictures of me & I won't post pictures of your wife. ;-) My thinking (right or wrong) is that Facebook's social network makes it much easier to unambiguously associate my professional identity with my personal identity, especially when combined with another social network like LinkedIn. If I have overlapping relationships in two systems like that, it's not hard to figure out that the personal/Facebook 'me' is the same 'me' as the LinkIn/professional 'me'. And that has a high probability of affecting me professionally at some time in the future.
rue 16y ago
> For each online presence, I decide if it will be professional or personal, and then try to make sure they don't overlap. Similar reasons; I usually try to have my not-directly-related presences separate from eachother to the extent that, for example, I use a different image hosting service for Twitter and the various discussion boards so that the latter cannot discover the former. Sometimes I let people know where to look, sometimes they find me by accident. The internet being what it is, it is possible to link the various presences but it is generally not feasible for a non-government entity. The downside of this is that I lack and will lack an "established online presence" with its transient and overlapping benefits. Sometimes it would be nice to be known.

by rm-rf 16y ago

mikeryan 16y ago

I tried to keep linkedin and facebook private but once a client (who I'm friends with) friended me it made my facebook pretty damn vanilla, and its stayed that way as I've added other professional friends. Now I don't even worry about it I just don't put stuff out on facebook that reveals much. I mostly just lurk and post something I think is funny but not too racy. So I'm on facebook but I'm not worried about anything "getting out" because I don't have anything to hide in that zoo. I've been more tempted to say things that are revealing in this forum but since I use my real name it makes me keep things pretty tight - I'm not going to post anything too offensive. Again - I'm okay with that. In a way I've sacrificed being able to say some things I might later regret. But then again I'm not saying things on teh interwebs that I might regret.

metamemetics 16y ago
>but once a client (who I'm friends with) friended me it made my facebook pretty damn vanilla, and its stayed that way as I've added other professional friends. This is a usability problem with facebook. It should be easy as pie to control the information you present to different GROUPS of people. Instead functionality is scattered across by CONTENT TYPE. Makes no sense and is completely illogical, social networking is about people, differing content-types are just small variations on the sharing theme and not the main conceptual focus. The 100 different content types are the entity sets with privacy attributes, rather than having privacy be an attribute on a manually created (small) number of groups of people. We put people in groups (ie. professional, family, friends) in real life, I can't understand how Facebook can possibly get this so wrong. The root of these problems is piss poor User Interface decisions. Facebook expanded without a plan. It's just like Urban Sprawl: let's add a bunch of widgets everywhere just like a suburb with zero urban planning adds strips malls.

patrickaljord 16y ago

> I've stayed away simply because of the inevitable overlap between my personal and professional lives. You can can create simple work/family/etc lists of friends and when you post something you choose who gets it. In some ways, you do pick a recipient whenever you send an email, so it's not like you're not used to having to pick a recipient when posting something on the web. Facebook makes it pretty easy every time you post a status to choose the list of people, or a black list, or white list or even pick the people one by one that will be able to read your post, same as with emails.

mbreese 16y ago
Yeah, but it can be pretty easy to click the wrong list or send something to the wrong list. It is too easy to make a mistake. Plus, what happens if someone else tags you in the college picture of you doing a keg stand? That's not something you have any control over and yet something that you may not want potential employers to see.
- piguy314 16y ago
  I have all my work contacts blacklisted from seeing photos I'm tagged in.
- patrickaljord 16y ago
  > Yeah, but it can be pretty easy to click the wrong list or send something to the wrong list. So does that mean you never use email either? > Plus, what happens if someone else tags you in the college picture of you doing a keg stand? That's not something you have any control over and yet something that you may not want potential employers to see. Actually, you can prevent people from tagging you. Also, if someone has a picture of you doing a keg stand and puts it on the internet, you're pretty much screwed, facebook or not.
  - rm-rf 16y ago
    >So does that mean you never use email either? No, But it does mean that I use separate e-mail accounts on separate systems for each social realm. My professional, personal and 'internet' presences are divided up between my ISP, GMail, Yahoo & Microsoft, as are my on line photos, blog comments, blogs, address books, etc. > if someone has a picture of you doing a keg stand I think that depends on the context. If they post the picture along with my name and enough of my address/phone number to identify me and associate the photo with the resume that my prospective employer had, then yes, I'm screwed. That's why I make deals with my friends -- you don't post pictures of me & I won't post pictures of your wife. ;-) My thinking (right or wrong) is that Facebook's social network makes it much easier to unambiguously associate my professional identity with my personal identity, especially when combined with another social network like LinkedIn. If I have overlapping relationships in two systems like that, it's not hard to figure out that the personal/Facebook 'me' is the same 'me' as the LinkIn/professional 'me'. And that has a high probability of affecting me professionally at some time in the future.

rue 16y ago

> For each online presence, I decide if it will be professional or personal, and then try to make sure they don't overlap. Similar reasons; I usually try to have my not-directly-related presences separate from eachother to the extent that, for example, I use a different image hosting service for Twitter and the various discussion boards so that the latter cannot discover the former. Sometimes I let people know where to look, sometimes they find me by accident. The internet being what it is, it is possible to link the various presences but it is generally not feasible for a non-government entity. The downside of this is that I lack and will lack an "established online presence" with its transient and overlapping benefits. Sometimes it would be nice to be known.