Different Stuff for your places?

So if you are in multiple places -- let's say Facebook, Google+, and Twitter -- like I am, should you put different entries in each place? I go from one place to another and find much the same things in each. Twitter is a bit different than the other two, primarily because of its 140 character limit. That tends to make it the announcement place pointing to other places like this, where you can be more verbose. But, because of automated posting programs, I'm finding the same thing in both Google+ and Facebook. Makes keeping both sort of silly. Sure, Google+ has circles while Facebook has friends, but the content seems to be pretty much the same. Should it be? Are they like competing retailers who carry the same stuff and only differentiate themselves by price or service? Both are platforms and I wonder if they could differentiate themselves by the content that can be applied to either.

House Cleaning at the 3rd Place

It's the last day of 2011 and I'm doing some house cleaning at the various places I hang out on the web. I'm looking through the folks I follow and eliminating some that just aren't all that productive. I started at following 125 Twitter accounts at 11 h 16 m to go to 2012 here in Sacramento. I'm trying to evaluate them by volume and benefit that I have gained through following them. I should point out that I follow Twitter accounts for work, news, and knowledge. I use other 3rd places to link with friends and family. at 11h 0m to go to 2012 I am following 95 Twitter accounts. Most are related to things I'm doing at work, news, or interests at home.

I have 72 followers. I'm uncertain why most of them follow me, but I suspect many of them do so to get me to follow them and buy some product or service. At 10h 47m to 2012, it's not exactly working. I am following fewer than 10% of the people who follow me. Mostly for the same reason that they follow me -- I don't want to know about their product or service.

On to Facebook . . . Not much to change here. Not exactly rolling in friends, and am following only a small number of pages. Made a small change to my user name.

. . . 10h 36m to go and on to Google+. This one was new this year and I'm still evaluating it as a place to hang out (pun intended for one of their features . . . one I haven't tried yet). No changes here, so I'm moving to the oldest blog I have on the website. For a while now, I have been revisiting, rewriting and removing some of the blogs I wrote over the years. Today, I'm looking more at removing than anything else.

. . . 10h 3m to go and I'm done visiting my 3rd places and tidying up for the year. From my places to your places, a blessed and prosperous new year to all the world.

Wolfram Alpha

If you like to know stuff, you need to try Wolfram/Alpha. Here's a widget to try:



I'm just now trying out this beta widget for fun. If it doesn't work, try the link to the site. It's interesting.

Monetizing Social Media

I have followers who are obviously only following me in the hopes that I will follow them and then buy their product or service. They are using social media just to get people to buy their stuff. Others try to monetize social media by placing advertising on their content.Hopefully they have some content worth monetizing. I just read an article stating that some of the social media IPO's are down as much as 30-40% over their initial prices. The markets are, obviously, unsure of the profit potential of social media.

I find that promoted posts appearing in my stream irritate me much the same as SPAM does in e-mail. Only, this time, I can't avoid them by routing them to a SPAM folder. They are there for me to read -- like I'm really interested in the black friday specials from . . . or the weekly sales from . . . or getting my . . . adjusted. Nope, I'm not. We'll see how social media is monitized in the future as platforms like Facebook are utilized by more and more commercial enterprises.

Finding Friends -- Does it HAVE to be this Hard?

I don't have a lot of friends on Facebook. In fact, my kids laugh at me. But I tried to find a couple of people today and it was difficult. You can put their names into the search box, but, unless they have an extremely rare name, you get hundreds of returns and can't filter them by any other criteria. You can "Find Friends" and enter all sorts of criteria, except the most important one, their NAME. Hey Facebook. How about combining the two in to something really useful?

You shouldn't do everything just because it's available . . . (paraphrase from Louis CK on Conan)

I saw this and thought, "yeah, he's right" Louis hates Twitter. He has an account just so he can tell everyone how much, it seems. He's right about the fact that you shouldn't do everything just because it's available. The idea is to experience life. But it seems that more and more, recording life is experiencing life. Turn off your device and live.

Sharpton on MSNBC

Al Sharpton is hosting the 6PM slot on MSNBC. I heard an interview on NPR with a black journalist in which the premise was, "why Sharpton and not a black journalist?". Although the discussion went on for about five minutes, the answer was given in the first minute of the piece. Ratings were up 18% during Rev. Sharpton's trial period in the slot. And ratings -- read "profit" -- are the name of the game, not good news reporting and analysis. It's the same reason we see people buying wedding dresses -- people watch it. You can dress it up all you want, but ratings are the name-of-the-game in broadcasting because profits are the name-of-the-game in business and broadcasters are profit-driven enterprises.