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Social Suicide (Part 2)
Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.
The biggest social networking no-no is what Thomas Gillespie--director of the graduate interactive communications program in the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn.--calls “following/friending and unfollowing/unfriending”, the most social aspect of social networks.
“People often go hog wild when they figure out that Facebook and Twitter are like popularity contests,” says Gillespie. “So they try to follow and friend everyone in sight. This also opens you up to Twammers, or twitter spammers, who later have to be dealt with. This means spending too much of your day trying to follow the lives of too many--many who share tweet like crazy.”
The problem is that on both Facebook and Twitter, you reach over-capacity quickly, says Gillespie. “Then you have to find a way to unfriend and unfollow,” he adds. “In most cases, the friend or the followed never knows what happened. But once in a while, they go to check a profile and find they are no longer a friend or being followed. It is a rejection. When TweetDeck prints out ‘Oh dear, someone is no longer being followed,’ it creates the feeling of a very personal action, which feels awkward even if it isn’t.”
Gillespie says that Twitter and Facebook have an odd concept of bankruptcy, where you just get rid …
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