Category Archives: Social Media

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I use social media. For a while I was so big on using social media that I totally forgot why I have it in the first place. I mean seriously, a Foursquare page for this blog? WTH? So deleted that sucker because this blog doesn’t “check in” to places it can’t actually go to.

I’m also going to make it a point to not publish my Hey, Mr. Bass! episodes on here anymore because they’re supposed to stand on their own. Of course it sure would be nice to be able to get a digest of what I do every day across all of my social media platforms… My friend Abby does a good job of posting a newsletter every morning around eight o’clock and I get to read it before I start a long day at work, which is really nice. I might do it for #SlidingDown2012 or at least something similar.

Which reminds me…

My projects are gettin’ real because we’ve got a hashtag! :D Okay, so I’m sure I’m going to be the only person using it, but I like the idea of it and it amuses me. There’s a lot to do, and the biggest of these is getting a grip on how I use social media. For the most part, I don’t like shoving my content down people’s throats. It’s even worse when I repost it in a bunch of different places and people see it multiple times. And I’m getting sick of it because I have to post it in different places.

This is the part where I advocate someone build a social network that lets you aggregate everything you are as a person or brand and add comments to the links/embedded content if you feel like it. People “subscribing” to you get to pick which content they want. They might be able to make better choices if they can filter by source, type, etc. And of course, content would be pulled from other sources and not pushed to you in a news feed.

Why am I writing this? Well, I’ve had that idea in my head for the longest time but I don’t have the resources to build it. Maybe #SlidingDown2012 will help me get to that point but I can’t right now. And I figure if someone else randomly reads this and decides they can build it, then go ahead! This reminds me of a story, so sit back because I’m going to tell it to you.

I’ve been writing Cucumber tests at work for a month or so now. You don’t need to know what that is specifically, only that I have to write a lot of these tests to automatically test out our software. After a while it got pretty ridiculous to maintain and figure out which tests I’d already written. It got to be a big nightmare and it sucked.

After spending so much time with that problem, I figured out a solution that could help me out, only… I don’t know how to write software. So I took lots of notes of what I wanted this fictitious software to do even though I didn’t have it. Then just this week I was surfing the Internet looking for more answers and I found YARD-Cucumber, the software I would’ve tried building if I had the know-how.

There’s two lessons here. The first is that I can’t build solutions to problems faster than I can come up with the specifications for the solution. By posting what I’m thinking, I’m inviting others to get involved and that’s really key. A good community will provide the right folks for the job at hand.

The second takeaway is that the community I have right now doesn’t have the answers to what I’m doing. If my work buddies knew the ins and outs of writing Cucumber tests, they would have told me to use YARD-Cucumber or something similar or, if they didn’t have a solution, at least let me know there was a problem. These developers are smart people, no doubt, but they’re not designers so they’re not going to have the same perspective as me. If most of my problems were in their domain (and a few are) then I wouldn’t have this huge desire to be better at what I do.

Luckily for me, most of my personal problems are not solved by other people.

I’m a dreamer, so I have these illusions of grandeur from time to time that drive me to do some pretty wicked things. One of those things would be to build a social network, since all the cool kids are doing it. To get to that point — or to gather the community necessary to find people who could help me out — I need to take some baby steps. I’m making a list of things I need to learn in 2012 so I can be a baller at whatever I decide to do.

If you want to see one of those first steps, head over to Last Semester, my new blog on being a six-month old designer. The style over there will be a bit different than what you might be used to over here, but it’s still me. And hell, if I ever end up publishing a book, that will also be me to some extent and it’ll probably be even more different than what I post over at Last Semester. Anyhoo, I want to keep my designer projects separate from here because a) it’s going to be way more technical, and b) if it blows up I don’t want to burden people with 1200+ life posts I’ve massed over the past six years of my life.

It’s late and I still need to do some blog setup, so I’ll leave you with this much for now. I’m sure there will be plenty more tomorrow and for Monday’s vlog, so be sure to stay posted.

So this week I teamed up with Jeff to try out Rdio, one of the many awesome music streaming services out there. I made the switch from Spotify for a few reasons, the first being that Rdio has a far superior UI as well as social media capabilities. Spotify has piggy-backed off of Facebook’s network quite well, but outside of posting to the Open Graph, Spotify lacks a lot.

Rdio is also free without ads, which is a plus. They’ll cap you after a month if you use their service too much — they use some fancy algorithm to determine that, haha — but I think that’s much better than what Spotify offers. And if you want unlimited, uninterrupted service, you can just use Grooveshark! All three scrobble to Last.fm too, for those of you who care about monitoring your listening habits. :)

Rdio also has cleaner music tags than Grooveshark or Spotify, and it can be played inside a browser or on the desktop, much like Pandora One users (which I also use). And since Jeff and I are paying for a family subscription, we get to pay less than with Spotify for the top features.

At work I’ve run into some minor interface bugs but nothing that I couldn’t figure out how to fix. The biggest problem is probably skipping, which occurs over slow Internet connections such as large work networks or at home when I’m also uploading a YouTube video. Spotify lets you get around this by setting songs for offline use, and even without that feature Spotify seems to stream better for me. Pandora will sometimes stop, while Rdio seems to have the worse frequency. However, Rdio lets you sync tracks with your phone so this is only really a desktop issue.

Above I embedded a playlist featuring Hey Monday and Paramore, two female singer-lead pop punk bands that I’m really jonesing right now. It’s also a great showcase of the social power of Rdio; you can use it without signing up or leaving my blog! Pandora and Spotify all require you to open in their apps. >_< Isn't Rdio grand?

And no, I'm not just a huge fan of Rdio because one of my co-workers left to go work for them. :) But dammit, he was a good developer and that definitely speaks volumes about a company that wants to hire him!

Edit: Turns out Grooveshark does let you embed playlists! It wasn’t as UI obvious as Rdio but still something I could’ve easily seen if I looked more carefully. :P

Today I started to look into how I want to use Pinterest, which some people tout as the “better version of Tumblr.” I’d argue instead that it’s just a better way to organize the things you share on the Internet. Tumblr, for me at least, is still a stream-of-consciousness sort of thing. And while Tumblr simplifies blogging, Pinterest simplifies representing what you want to share.

For example, posting a typical article on Facebook or Google+ will let you take an image from that article to represent it. Sometimes there’s a good picture that goes with the article and sometimes there isn’t, but the big point is that the picture isn’t representative of the article. The only way to get an accurate portrayal of the article is to actually read it! So the image is really just there to catch the eye and nothing more.

Pinterest works a bit differently by displaying the content right there on the onset. If you go over and check out my “black and white photo Pinterest board you’ll notice that you don’t have to go anywhere to see the content or understand some of the aesthetics I want for my collection of “Internet things.” You also don’t have to click on any of the photos unless you want to see a bigger image, find the source or read up on some of the other, finer details.

Tumblr organizes things as a feed i.e. in reverse chronological order from posting, just like on the bigger social networks. It’s true you can get themes to make Tumblr work a bit like Pinterest, but it’s more work. I’m actually really glad there are still services out there that keep things simple instead of trying to be the next Facebook or Twitter. Those services are overcrowded, confusing and frankly not nearly as awesome as they were when they first launched. I’m even starting to feel that way about FourSquare. :/

In short, I like Pinterest. A lot. Since I think it’s still a relatively small service, I’m going to depend on Google to find the images I want to use and pin them to the boards. And if you’ve already noticed, I’m creating color boards, so Google Image Search will also help me there! But mainly I think Pinterest’s organization is key and is what will keep it unique.

Yesterday was the last day of work for one of my co-workers before he moves west for a shiny new job. He sent out an email to the company telling us how to contact him via Facebook and Twitter in case we missed him too much. :P So naturally I took the opportunity to connect via social media and thus began my flurry of Facebook adding activity.

I see social media differently because I’m entirely comfortable with it and I’ve been using it for years in one form or another. I often temporarily forget how much information folks put on the web that they’re not comfortable sharing with co-workers or others they don’t know. I’ve been keeping this in mind at work and haven’t been reaching out to connect through my social media networks as quickly as I might for people I’ve met in college. There’s a digital divide even here where age differences aren’t as large as I once thought they were for a digital divide to occur. As it turns out, what they taught me in school was really only breaking the ice of what’s actually going on out in the real world.

Taking all of this into account, I waited a week or so before adding co-workers on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is pretty harmless because it just lists work-related information and is mostly a professional relationship anyway. People don’t put their coveted personal information on LinkedIn because it was never that type of social network.

After a while I started following a few people in the office who were on Twitter. My company has a Twitter account so I just looked through the few followers it had and figured out who I knew. Like most social networking activities, I don’t put in a lot of effort to connect with people. Knowing Google and knowing my ability to use Google, I’m sure I could find every nook and cranny of the Internet a person has set up shop in. Instead, I don’t because people find it creepy and it’s a huge waste of my time. I never had this notion in my head that the Internet wasn’t an entirely public place. I do, however, forget that people can use the Internet to get information from me (mostly folks who I never interact with on the Internet) but the information they learn from me on this blog or elsewhere never bothers me.

Now that I’ve been working with my co-workers for three months, I’m choosing to connect via Facebook. Facebook always seems like a bit of a risk because I know not everyone is comfortable with “being friends” on Facebook and sharing all of that personal information. I’ve been denied by former teachers because, for whatever reason, they thought it was inappropriate to share stuff with me. They also probably didn’t know how to use their privacy settings either, yet another symptom of the digital divide.

I kept my rules simple. If we had a friend in common — most likely a co-worker of ours — then I’d add them. If not, then I’d let them be because I figure they don’t connect to co-workers. If the Facebook search algorithms can’t figure out who I’m looking for, I move on. Like I said earlier, I’m not here to connect because I want to stalk the crap out of them. It’s mostly just the social media nerd inside who thinks, “Eh, I’m curious. These guys seem cool and it’d be interesting to see how these connections play out.”

After all, you’re talking to a guy who writes in a blog that two of his co-workers have found already. Again, I’m totally fine with it! There’s always that, “Oh crap, are they going to treat me differently” moment but it passes soon and you forget that there was any intrusion into the “real you” in the first place.

The most surprising thing I’ve found out so far is that not everyone I know is linked together. When you’re with college kids, you’ll find that the new group of people you just hung out with is a complete connected graph. In other words, they’re all pairwise linked up via their social networks. If you’re familiar with the Social Network, you’ll remember how kids in that movie would look each other up on Facebook as soon as they were done socializing. That’s what my generation did and still does, so it always seems odd when people of other generations see that connection as something threatening and alien.

In the end, none of it really matters. I’ve seen friends re-add me after I removed them or they removed me. I’ve seen Facebook accounts created for pets, fake people, and inanimate objects. I’ve seen tribute groups and accounts set up for those who have passed away, and I’ve personally removed an account because the owner was no longer living. Being around social media for as long as I have means you’re not freaked out by it anymore. It’s still wonderful and interesting and amazing but I don’t use its structure and rules to determine the structure and rules of my “real” social life.