simplerich

I’m not sure what to do with this place. I’ve got posts out there. I’ve got them here and on my blogger blog and there are readers both places but Google+, somewhere I haven’t been more than  months I don’t think I have more readers and more interaction already than on both of my blogs combined.

I like the idea of my own blog, but the reality is I like interaction and readers and I have a LOT more of those, engaged readers, on Google+ than I have on either blog.

It’s the engagement of the readers that’s attracting me. Granted, I’m pretty careful about who I circle, and while over 2k people follow me I don’t follow that many at all. I’m just over 300 that I read, but I add more all the time, and sometimes remove people. There’s such a feeling of community, of conversation, of participation on Google+ I find I’ve spent far more time there than here.

I need to figure out what’s going to happen next obviously. Mirroring or merely importing those posts to here is a possibility but it seems like it’s diluting things. If you’re on Google+ look me up. If you’re not… the conversation there is absolutely incredible.

Jesup is my room mate’s cousin. I don’t know him well enough to say we’re friends yet but he’s not only really interesting, he’s going something really interesting and blogging about it so people can read all about it over at the aptly named Jesup’s Blog.

He’s a 20+ Iowan teaching in Chile. Here’s the thing… he went down there and THEN looked for a job! If you’ve read the 4-Hour Workweek I think it was? It suggests that the best way to see the world is GO where you want to go and get a job there. Become a local and see the sights. I hope I got that right. It seems especially timely with the death of Steve Jobs and his oft replayed and shared 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University.

(If you haven’t seen it go watch it. It’s worth it.) Jesup seems to be following Steve Jobs’ advice to do what he’s passionate about and it’s paying off in a rich and interesting story that he’s living. Go give him a read, add him to your news feed and let his example inspire you.
 

I’m over on google+ and invite you to circle me if you’re over there. It’s NOT just another Facebook, or just another twitter in my experience. There’s more content, more community, and more discussion. It’s still growing and this morning I wrote this over there and thought I’d share it with you over here as well.

I find myself going to things like group.as and wondering what group I want to be a part of… where to look for like-minded people… then I find myself wandering off… the little snippets of description aren’t enough to hook me so I wind up not using it.

I find I’ve no time at all for the Seth G.’s and Guy K.’s and Robert S.’s out there any more. In the same way Kim Kardashian is famous for making a sex tape and then claiming to be a celebrity I find these three famous for… I don’t know what. I know I’m the only one, but it seems like if the three of them talked about why Downy fabric softener is blue within a week there would be a million thought pieces about it on the internet and I don’t find the things they talk about interesting. They plant seeds that others pick up and re-plant just because they are who they are, and don’t seem to pay much attention to what they’re saying and their qualifications for saying what they say is that they’ve said so much before that other people have listened to and parroted. I know that’s unkind, but I can’t get past that feeling I get from them.

I wonder if every morning they wake up feeling like they’re playing a part… being a character created by our perceptions of them and hoping like hell that they can keep running long enough…. because the rest of the Internet follows them so they’ve got a perfect Papier-mâché backside but the front is all just bamboo framework holding it all up, an empty facade that they go to sleep at night praying nobody notices.

Perhaps once they were fresh and new and exciting and that’s why people followed them, but now… now I don’t get that feeling. I didn’t like them then either though… they’ve always seemed affected, put on, like an act.

I’m sure they’re wonderful people underneath the Internet personae that they’ve cultivated. I just don’t click with them at all. When I find myself following a link that winds up at their place I close the tab. I just can’t be bothered to get caught up in the cult of personality they have built around themselves…. did they build it on purpose? Did it happen accidentally and then the beast was so big they didn’t know how to stop it? I can’t imagine it was an accident, but I can’t imagine anybody setting out to have as their job “personality” either. It just feels creepy and needy to me… and vaguely unhealthy.

Their words carry weight not because of their content but by virtue of who said them. That is troublesome to me… That’s the short version.

I’m an introvert. I’m very shy and I don’t think I’m good at meeting people or talking to them in social settings. Professionally this doesn’t seem to bother me much as I’m able to talk to people with whom I work and with people at work just fine. It’s a comfort zone thing. At work or related to work I’m fine. No worries at all. I’ll approach complete strangers with ease, figure out where they fit in with my work, find a point of commonality and strike up a conversation. I’ve done it at dinner parties, conventions, trade shows, and just working day to day. No sweat.

The sweat comes in when I’m not working. When I’m just me and I’m dumped into a social situation where I know the people who invited me but nobody else. I’m awful at those things. They’re exactly the same as the work situations in numbers of people or how well I know them… but my comfort level is off. Suddenly I’m no longer chatty or friendly or smiling. I’m stand-offish, and could just as easily stand in a corner, sip a drink until it’s gone, find the host, thank them for the invitation and sneak out the door after having “made an appearance.” What I’m describing isn’t rare either. It’s really normal social behavior for me. I don’t know why it’s so different. I’m confident, social, affable, and outgoing at work functions. Throw me in with non-work people though and I’m an awkward self-conscious wall flower.

Podcasts. I really like podcasts. I drive a lot for work so I listen to a lot of them. One of my favorite episodes was from Lisa B. Marshall, the Public Speaker from Quick & Dirty Tips. She talks about how to talk to people. She talks about her Mom starting to talk to people in line at the grocery store and how mortified she was by it. I’ve started trying to do this. It’s a little thing, a silly thing, a safe thing. Nobody gets better at something without practicing it so I’ve been practicing my chatting people up out in public with strangers. That way if I botch it I won’t embarrass myself in front of people I know. My hope is that this will help when I get to the next social function I attend that’s not work related. With the practice under my belt, and the confidence of having done this before in non-work related venues I’ll be able to do it a little better with people I will probably see again, and hopefully for more than just “making an appearance.”

So, if you’re shy or reticent to just jump into a social setting give this podcast a listen. Then, most importantly, practice it on people you’ll never see again.

Why do I care about Facebook’s privacy issues? After all, as Rob pointed out, I already have a blog, have posted on Usenet, and various public web forums in the past. I’ve been engaged with the Internet since 1993 there’s a LOT of me out there if someone wants to go looking for it. He’s right. There is. I’m also very careful about what I put out there online. I always have been. Even with the things like foursquare and twitter.

So why do I care about Facebook if I’m so careful about what I do on the Internet? The most common thing I hear about people when I bring up privacy concerns is “If you don’t have anything to hide what do you have to worry about?” My answer to them is, “Why do you use curtains or walls? Why do you shut the door when you go to the bathroom stall?” There are times when you don’t want the whole world up in your business. If I have co-workers and bosses who follow me on facebook, and I did, and they didn’t like what political sites I visited that suddenly showed up on my facebook page could that have consequences? Of course it could. Should it? Nope. But it could. What if it showed that I was on facebook while I was supposed to be working. Would they know I was on hold for the weekly conference call? Of course not.

Those are just the easy work related issues. The thing is. What I do on the Internet is no more Facebook’s business than it’s my phone company’s business if I go to the mall or to Wal-mart. It’s not their business. They don’t need to know it. Just because they CAN know it doesn’t mean they should know it. If they wanted to enrich my Internet experience they’re welcome to it, but ask me first. Let me CHOOSE to ask for it. Don’t opt me in.

I don’t really feel like I should have to explain my expectation of privacy honestly. The part where I expect and want it and am being asked to defend it is almost as offensive to me as my perception of Facebook’s violation of my privacy.

From a social hacking point of view what can we find out about a person from their facebook profile? Often they list their parents’ names which may include “mother’s maiden name” or “Father’s middle name” as appears in some security questions on some websites. Perhaps they show you graduated from Monkeyspanker High School and that security question is also asked, “What was your high school mascot.” Now decent social hackers would know that. That’s sort of my other point. Why should all that information be gathered up by the fine folks at Facebook for the social hackers out there to use? Maybe I don’t list my Mom’s middle name, but perhaps my sisters do, or my brothers, or my trans-gendered first pet whose name was “Sieze-her” and with all the information out there linking back and forth whether I put it out there or someone else does it’s out there.

I won’t deny that I greatly enjoyed re-connecting with my friends on Facebook. That added value to my life in general, and to my enjoyment of the Internet specifically. It was really good to meet them again as adults after having not seen them since high school. There are some really interesting people out there that I knew back when we were just high schoolers.   I will miss them. If Facebook were to decide that our privacy were important I’d gladly be back, but as much as I love re-connecting with everybody I feel like staying says it’s OK if a company has no respect for their customer’s wishes. It’s my saying it’s OK to treat my personal information as a publicly tradeable commodity. I’m not OK with that. My leaving may not make a difference to Facebook, but it will make a difference to me.

Thursday I’m going to be on Farmville meeting a friend of mine to watch Survivor together and then I’m going to log off my account, perhaps deleting it if I can find a way to do that.