The End of Facebookuary!

So I've turned Facebook on again - Hi to e-Veryone reading this! Hope you've all had an awesome February. I must say, I'm not all that excited about being back on, but definitely keen to see some pics of what you've been up to.  My original goal was to catch up with peeps in the real world.  I did a bit of that, made some overdue calls and so on, but was a little distracted with work & my daughter's health. Needless to say, social networking in the Facebook sense is good for times like the above mentioned, if only for convenience when time is scarce.  Either way, I still find that it is a distraction, so I made some changes...

The biggest change - I deleted A LOT of people from my friends list, down from around 300 to only 30. Not because I don't like them, not at all, but because I only want to interact with family and other people quite close/important to me.  In saying that, I think I may have gone overboard as Facebook doesn't make it easy to remove friends, in fact, I KNOW I have accidentally removed a number of people I wanted to remain connected to.  Whether that is a browser error or a FB error, I don't know.  It would have been easier to just have all people in a list with a check box & a delete button (just like deleting your emails!). But, that's how FB grows, by overwhelming suggestions of possible connections, hobbies & interests.  Of course they would not make it easy to remove connections!

Throughout Feb I spent about the same amount of time on google+ as I normally do.  Checking in for updates maybe 2 to 3 times a day. A few shares & posts here and there.  Great interactions with people I share interests with (gaming, tech & vinyl to begin with).  These are mostly random people with great ideas & opinions.  Perfect for a quick snapshot on what is happening around the world in terms of things I'm passionate about.

For some reason the pace has been picking up on LinkedIn.  Colleagues, former & current, have been adding me & endorsing my skills.  I've never really spent much time on this site but I can see it's worth.  Great for professional recommendations, networking and probably also perfect for when you're on the job hunt!  I've heard a few stories of people being poached by other companies because of their LinkedIn profile.  Interesting.  Glad I'm happy where I am.

I've never really been a fan of the other big networking sites.  I understand Twitter, but it never really grabbed me as true social networking, more a public SMS forum. Does that even make sense??  I also found that following the same people/companies on google+ were easier to interact with, in that I had better interactions because real people with real names were talking.

All in all, going forward I'm going use g+ to interact with people who share similar interests to me, LinkedIn (and Salesforce Chatter) for professional interactions & Facebook for family & close friends.  I think the only thing left for me to work out now is how to adjust all of my Facebook privacy settings again...