Scoville Units Unite

02 Aug

Anti-social media

I was initially quite excited by the launch of Google +, mainly due to it separating circles of friends in an easy to manage way.

I have been quite wary of posting things online due to overlapping circles of friends. A number of cases have emerged where people have been fired for gross misconduct for posting on facebook and the like about how their work sucked that day or that they hate their boss.

With the rise of social media, most people seem to look at it as basically an online version of blethering with mates down the pub or whatever. Does anyone know of any case where telling someone in the pub work sucked today ended in them being sacked? No doubt these were hard to prove, with no screencap of you saying it. I always looked on it as if an employer wants to control what I say outside mon-fri 9-5 they can pay me for those hours where they restrict my right to vent. Due to this I was always pretty strict about adding people from work to various social network sites etc.

The other work issue is what if I post to twitter at 10:30am when I am working. Seeing that tweet might be seen as evidence of skiving, what if I am in the middle of running a suite of unit tests though which is going to take 10minutes? Hard to prove.

With my blog I write a random assortment, food, rants, politics, religion, coding, geeky hobbies.

With facebook I have everything set to privacy-Max and went through the rubbish process of adding people to groups so that where appropriate I can only post to a group subset. I also tend to have purges every couple of months of people who I don’t really know, or my current gripe – organisations who set up accounts instead of pages/groups.

With twitter I have it locked down at private and really only allow people to follow me if I know them. I tend to post a mixture of humour, satire, politics. Twitter doesn’t have any way to only post to lists etc though.

With LinkedIn I set up a profile and use it as professional me online. That is a free for all and anyone I know can be added there. I don’t link it to my blog, twitter, facebook etc though.

With Google Plus, separating circles of friends or acquaintances is much simpler though. I think with that I may use it as a free for all and just add people to lots of circles to separate messages.

How do you separate your private, personal, public and family life in the social media age?

3 Responses to “Anti-social media”

  1. 1
    Michael Says:

    “I can only post to a group subset” – I wondered why I rarely see updates from you anymore on FB!

    Facebook: highest privacy but could easily cull the friends list.

    Twitter: free-for-all, have had it private before but find it more entertaining public, not that I post much of interest.

    Google+: tumbleweed, though I like the circles idea – unfortunately it’s pretty much useless unless everyone migrates over from FB. I think there was good reason for the migration from Bebo/MySpace to FB, but as G+ is so similar can anyone really be bothered moving their entire social life over when the two sites are ultimately pretty similar?

    Flickr: free-for-all – pointless otherwise!

  2. 2
    Alan G Says:

    Yeah Google+ merges together the best privacy/sharing bits of the other services but doesn’t really add much extra. At least for me.

    I’ve heard people rave about the hangout stuff, and if you have lots of other google stuff that will all integrate well – picassa groups pulled in to google+ look really good. The only other google eco-system I use are analytics, webmaster tools and groups though so it doesn’t have those benefits for me.

  3. 3
    Scoville Units Unite » Blog Archive » Anti Social-Media Says:

    […] A few years ago I paused and took a look at the way I was using social media. […]

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