The Blogo’Shawn

And then there was one social aggregator ‘to rule them all’…at least for the millisecond: FriendFeed - I’m on there as ’shabo’, if you care to track me.

Chiming in after a drought in personal blogging…

Been steeped in my social networks, and I find myself repeatedly evangelizing for two in particular: LinkedIn and Facebook. Yes, I preach the virtues of LinkedIn to my unenlightened, professional relatives and friends, as in ‘why didn’t you complete your profile? Don’t you know you can attract the right kind of recruiters and opportunities by buffing up your LinkedIn?!’ And I’m deadly serious too as my experience has borne out. I have garnered some wonderful introductions and interactions via LinkedIn, and let me tell you, if you happen to encounter a juicy job description emanating from one of your first or second network contacts on LinkedIn…well, there’s no finer way to fly. They can screen you easily and see what you’re all about, and you are, oh, many tens of percentage points more likely to get an interested response. Square that off with chugging your way through Monster, Dice, Craigslist, et al. Couldn’t be easier!

And then we have Facebook. I began my affair with Facebook only a year ago and it has wormed its way into my psyche to the point that I check in practically every day and now leave my MySpace account untapped for weeks (take that you fugly user experience!). And you know why I am latched to Facebook? Because I want to see which events my friends are RSVPing for, and there is no better way to reduce my needing to scout out events of interest on my own precious time. Sure I used to pour over other services to meet the need, but I progressively find myself dispensing with the others in favor of Facebook’s native events app - it trumps all others!

Now I would be remiss in not mentioning Twitter. So happens that Twitter doesn’t render me delerious with excitement so far. I know it does others who are more into getting their name and personal brand out to the tweetosphere. Bloggers, vloggers, and marketing folk especially seem latched onto it. Only…I don’t have the patience to wade through all the cruft to ferret out the good stuff. Good stuff for me simply comprises knowing where the buzz is and better yet, where people are massing for social occasions. I installed Twhirl and monitored activity in the moment for awhile, and all the updates were so disruptive for the most part, almost akin to repeated phone calls from telemarketers. I just don’t care, particularly with the healthy dosage of ‘@’ bantering which fly by and don’t mean diddley-squat to me. Someone at a mobile chat recently nailed it on the head and referred to Twitter as a mini-exhibitionist platform…so true! All told, I put my Twittery thing into dry-dock and presently adore the vast silence…permeated with my thoughts alone.

So in summary, ‘yea’ for LinkedIn and Facebook. ‘Meh’ for Twitter, unless I’m headed to a conference like SXSW, and here’s hoping MySpace implodes to rubble sometime soon.

And just to extraneously tack on one more find for fun: Pandora. Love it to smithereens and it often trumps the selections contained on my mere iPod!

Note: I decided to turn the @reply setting off on my Twitter feed and that really helped - right away I saw a notice regarding a social friend who has been admitted to the hospital! Now then, if users were allowed to set urgency level on their tweets and I had the ability to filter for high urgency only sometimes…well then I could see myself clinging to Twitter more.