Philoking.com

In the beginning I accepted every request. When a graduation class group started, the invites started pouring in like a flood. I accepted all of them and before long I had over 300 friends on Facebook. These days I have 136, and regularly I go through the list and prune it here and there.

I get invites from people I know, and I ignore them. I don’t ignore all of them of course, but I have built criteria over time.

So, what’s the most valuable real estate on Facebook? My feed is the most valuable to me. That’s how I keep up with what the people I care about are up to, and I make sure that I don’t have to sift through things that are irrelevant to me to see it.

Maybe if I read my feed non-stop it wouldn’t matter so much, but as I only check it every little bit, having a mountain of friends will mean you miss a whole lot.

Case in point, my family owns a restaurant in North Carolina. I live in Bellevue, Washington over 3,000 miles away. Now logic would say “it’s your family so accept that request!” but I say no. Any events, specials or news they share will be of no use to me. It may be a bit militaristic, but if the individual family members I follow are on Facebook, I will see what is up in their lives, I don’t need to follow their workplace.

The same goes for vague acquaintances from high school, college and past jobs. Sure my close friends stay, but I see every person that I don’t have a close tie to as potentially erasing information from people I do care about by bumping them down the feed.

I refuse to believe that I have even 136 friends that I should be following so closely, but I have settled at that number…for now.

I guess it comes down to what do you use a social network for. If you are of the narcissistic camp and just want everyone you have ever met to see how awesome you are now, collect away. If you are in the community camp, keep your friends to people you actually engage with and you might find it to be a lot more useful, fun and relevant.

With very few exceptions, I have ran across everyone I ever went to high school with on Facebook. From the first week I joined, I was inundated with friend requests from everyone you could imagine. In many cases they were even people I don’t remember getting along with at all. Of course you, probably just like them, add them hoping to turn over a new leaf and show how much you have grown since high school.

The interesting part is that we have all grown since high school, but not always in the ways we might expect. Many people I expected to stay close with for life, I was still close with without Facebook. Some people who I thought I would be friends with forever, I lost touch with way before Facebook, and instead of rekindling those friendships with this new connection, I only confirmed how trivial they were to start with.

The real interesting ones are some of the people I had little to no contact with. After high school, life swallowed us up, chewed on us awhile, spit us out, and we landed with common ground that connected personalities that we would have otherwise never found.

So what’s the moral here? I would say there isn’t much of one you can do anything with now. Take the chance to add those people you never thought you clicked with. Get involved and take an interest to see where everyone landed. Once you survey the landscape and figure out who is meaningful to you, drop the outliers. Build a clan, share your life and have fun.

The real value of Facebook to me is those interactions. I would wake up tomorrow a happy man if a virus ripped through Facebook over night and shredded all of the fan pages, the Mob Wars, faux-causes and quizzes. Those things are on a one way trip to ignore-ville for me anyway. But I still thank Facebook for helping me put some perspective on relationships that I have questioned for years, and helping me find new ones.

I had read a little about the new Facebook user names today, and was surprised at the flaming negativity on Facebook’s blog post describing the feature. It was, well, read it:

That’s a bit overboard don’t you think? Facebook user names are a great idea and here is why:

1. Today, Facebook is most people’s online presence. It has replaced (for the most part) personal blogs, photo sharing sites, journals and social networks. It’s all of these combined. When you make a new contact and want to share your Facebook presence with them today, you have to say “You can find me on Facebook.” The user can then look you up and home there aren’t a bunch of people with your name. Facebook Profiles allow you to just say “I am at Facebook.com/jasonburns” and you are done.
2. Right now, linking to a Facebook profile is really ugly. Adding what is basically “pretty permalinks” gives Facebook a much better link story for business and fan pages. They link easier and are better for Search Engine Optimization.
3. It just makes perfect sense, get over it.

It’s coming, it’s overdue and it’s a good thing. Let it happen, calm down, I promise it will be ok.

MUI, or Multilingual User Interface, is the technology that Microsoft Windows and Office, as well as other applications, use to deal with multiple languages. So what does this have to do with Facebook? If you are the global icon I am (laughs), you obviously communicate with people all over the world. I have been trolling this old internet since the early 90s and my travels on IRC, message boards and usenet to name a few, have made me friendships that cross the entire globe.

These days, many of us manage these friendships with Facebook. Following my friends’ feeds and seeing what they post and comment on allows me to be somehow closer to them, and stay involved in what they are up to. I love it.

The problem comes in when you have many friends who use multiple languages regularly. Facebook knows what language I speak, they obviously know what language my friends speak, why don’t we go ahead and bridge the gap already.

This morning, I took a look at my feed and saw

Not being fluent in Hebrew, and the fact that it was 6am, what I thought I saw was

and are now friends.

But come on, it was 6am, honest mistake right?

Now I know that might not be the most culturally sensitive, and I mockingly apologize, but at any given time, my friend feed is populated with comments in Spanish, Hebrew, Russian and Norwegian, and those are only the common ones.

Working at Microsoft, Language translation is a huge part of our job, at this point in our development stage, many of the bugs we encounter are simply “this doesn’t look right in x language.”

If Facebook is ready to be a global meeting ground, it’s time that they address this.

I have only been using Twitter regularly for about a month. While I am totally enjoying it, this article on Adage.com brings me to a crossroads on where I feel Twitter fits in. Right now I have about 75 friends on Facebook and about 50/140 (Following/Followers) on Twitter. The interesting thing about them? They are mutually exclusive. I don’t follow anyone on Twitter that I communicate with on Facebook and vice-versa, with exception of two Channel-Flippers. (Great web video!) Why is that? Because with little exception, I don’t know anyone on Twitter personally and know everyone on Facebook on a personal level. I am not sure I am a representative user of either service, but I use Facebook for friends and family and Twitter for blog and business.

I post photos of my wife and son, I wall talk with my mom, things that have no business publicly broadcast on Twitter. The same goes for Twitter, I am sure that my last Tweet “philoking: someone give me a twitterific way to give away one of the cool retro MS-DOS shirts….” is of very little interest to my sister or cousins.

I think that it’s this type of segregation that will be the defining line between the two services. I sincerely hope that Facebook doesn’t go too far into the weeds trying to define delicate privacy settings that have group/user access and become way to cumbersome. While I am sure Facebook want’s Twitter’s market, I love that I can use two services and not have to worry, even to the point that I can link my Status messages together. Currently my straight status messages go to Facebook but replies do not and that’s a great compromise for me.

Facebook is full of “look at my cat” (guilty) and I just stumped my toe kind of stuff, which is the fastest way to get un-followed by me on Twitter. Those types of posts have sentimental value when they come from your sister, but they aren’t very interesting coming from a stranger.

Now if LinkedIn takes a stab at Twitter, that might be interesting, unfortunately for them, I think it’s probably too late.