social media – Doodles of the Mind

I have something to admit to you. I am tired.

I am extremely tired.

Yes. I admit that I drive from New Jersey to Maryland twice a week amounting to 12 hours in a car per week. I also get up at 5am to do this and get home generally around 930pm to then eat, do more work if needed or try and relax, and then do it again. I do this for my career, and yes it makes me tired enough to fall asleep for four hours on a Saturday afternoon after sleeping ten hours that night. But that isn’t why I am tired, or at least it isn’t why I am writing this post. I am so very extremely tired of the nonstop fire hose of bullsnozzle that is being spewed on a daily basis, from what seems like every human being on the planet twenty-four hours a day for the sole purpose of egocentric grandstanding. And I know. We get it. People are narcissistic on social media. What is he going to tell us next, “that a lack of sleep makes you tired?” No. I mean well yes a lack of sleep makes you tired. I am living proof of that, and I am sure I am slowly taking years off my life, but we already talked about that. I am not just ranting about the “people are ego maniacs on social media” thing. I get it. That is old hat as they say (in the early part of the twentieth century).

Continue reading “Being fake is a now a full-time job”

With the recent release of Google+ tech geeks are all in a frenzy trying out the site, documenting its every change, and comparing it to the reigning champion of social networking, Facebook. One of the main topics of discussion has focused on Google’s take on privacy, something its predecessor has continuously been attacked for, and in most if not all cases, the attacks were warranted. Facebook, and founder Mark Zuckerberg, have thus earned a reputation for poor communication of changes that affect privacy, and overall manipulation of user settings to mirror Zuckerberg’s philosophy on social sharing of information. The number of times and the consistency of such changes have left a bad taste in many Facebook user’s mouths, and have paved the perfect road for a challenger. In steps the juggernaut, Google, an icon and master of the Internet, but so far a failure at making their products social. In fact Google has had its own issues with privacy. In 2010 Google released the unsuccessful (yet still around for some reason) Google Buzz, which automatically set up followers based on email and chat behavior, and then shared those followers with the whole world. Prior to that Google tried to change how we collaborate with the release of Google Wave, also a decent size failure, but something that may later get characterized as too much too soon, and not due to a lack of trying. With its latest foray into the world of social networking, Google+ has taken great strides to convince the millions of new users that they care about privacy. They have done this by providing almost all features within Google+ the ability to restrict viewing and access (minus your profile photo that seems to just exist forever until you swap it out with a new one), and have made doing so very easy with simple to use toggles. Continue reading “Note to Google+ – Our privacy is more than a toggle”