As you can see from a previous post, I’m a big fan of Facebook.  However, there are some cautions which folks really need to think about when posting anything on the internet.  Here are a few with which I have had first hand encounters:

1.  Social Networking is no longer just for my generation.  My mom is on Facebook and MySpace.  So are a large number of my co-workers.  As a result, things that might be acceptable in my social spheres are no longer acceptable on Facebook.  For example, for awhile I had listed that I was married to my college roommate.  She and I were attached at the hip at school and it was a running joke among our friends that we were an old married couple.  This was fine until I started being friends with individuals who are not members of my generation.  For them, they did not understand the joke and began to make assumptions about me.  That is the last assumption I want people to make

2.  Prospective employers are on Facebook, too.  There have been several times that I have been the point person for hiring a new employee for my company.  For every person whose resume makes it to my potential interview category, I always do two things – I google them and I look them up on Facebook.  I can’t even count the number of people who have been eliminated from my pool of candidates because of something I found from one of those two sources.  They think they are only sharing the information with their friends, but they also shared the information with me, and, as a result, lost the opportunity to interview for the job.

When you post something on the internet, be very careful about it.  It doesn’t just go away when you remove it.  It is saved on a server somewhere waiting to come back and haunt you someday – so just do yourself a favor.  If you wouldn’t want your mother or pastor or kindergarten teacher to see something, don’t post it online.

This is an awesome post from The Tipping Glass

Be Careful Little Fingers What You Post

Related posts:

1. The Cool Kids are all on Facebook!
2. MyFamily.com

I was not an early adopter of social networks.  My school, being a smaller school, did not get Facebook as early as many others, and when our school was accepted as one of the schools in the network, I saw no reason to join.  It wasn’t until my roommate insisted that she would not go to dinner with me again unless I joined when I finally gave in.

I have always been a social person, but keeping up with people through, e-mail, letters and phone calls makes it so that, if someone is far away, you have to put forth a large amount of effort to know what is going on in that friend’s life.  When it comes down to it, you have to choose to not know what’s going on with certain people – and when you happen to see them in the grocery store 5 years later, don’t be surprised when they are married with three children.

Facebook has changed all that.  Now, I can have a bird’s eye view into the lives of so many people with whom I could never keep in touch – or now how to find – without Facebook.  For example, I had a great friend in second grade.  She and I were very close, but when I left the school to be homeschooled and she moved to North Carolina we lost touch.  Through Facebook we are now back in touch, and I know that today she is thinking, “where the weekend went…oh that’s right, work ate it.”

Not only is Facebook helpful in keeping up with folks you wouldn’t otherwise have contact with, it is also helpful in relationships with people you see or talk to all the time.  By uploading my wedding pictures to Facebook, I was able to share those pictures with all my close friends – otherwise I would have had to send them copies of the pictures, and there’s no way they would see most of them.  And my mom no longer bugs me to send her pictures of random events – she can just see them on Facebook.  I just looked through pictures of my cousin Charlie, who I’ve never met, and he is a fantastic looking little boy.

From this post you can probably tell that I only use Facebook.  I have a MySpace account, but I check that once a month at best.  I’m not ready to join the Twitter cult, but I think I may have just convinced myself through this post that it might be a good idea.  We’ll see.

What I’m saying is, if you’re holding back from the Social Networking world because you’re afraid of getting sucked in, ask yourself, would getting sucked in really be that bad?

This is an awesome post from The Tipping Glass

The Cool Kids are all on Facebook!

Related posts:

1. Be Careful Little Fingers What You Post
2. MyFamily.com
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