My online social networking plan
After struggling yesterday on multiple social networking sites to manage settings I didn’t even know existed, I realized I needed a general plan for my use of these programs.
General themes:
* It is good to be findable
* At some point, these networks might actually be useful as tools to do work (as opposed to zombie wars), so it’s good to have some presence there.
* Repeating information (and keeping it updated) everywhere is ridiculous
* Assume that anything posted anywhere, no matter its “privacy setting”, could potentially be viewed by anyone on the internet. 1
My plan:
* Create a profile on each major social network
* Set those profiles to be viewable by anyone
* Keep very minimal information on all profiles: name, photo, current location, email, website. This ensures people can find me, know that I’m the right person, and get in touch.
* Turn off or reduce all sharing and messaging settings on all sites. This is remarkably hard to do with most of them–they assume you want to make their site your home.
* Create a single, authoritative, public destination for more detailed information about me that I own and control. Owning this is important, as it’s the only way to be sure that I have the final control over what gets published.
* Keep my personal site updated only with information I would like to share with anyone on the internet, for all time.
* Link to that site from all other online profiles, and make it findable through Google.
With that plan, I hope to be findable in and have access to the major places other people are looking for me, without needing to worry about keeping multiple profiles all up to date or sharing unintended information. It’s hard to imagine most people pulling this off, however, for two main reasons.
First, as mentioned above, most sites make it very hard to reduce or eliminate sharing your information through them. They often require you provide information to begin with, and then make it impossible to turn off certain features. For instance, some Facebook settings allow you to share them with “no one” or “only me”, but others you must share with all your contacts.
Second, this plan relies heavily on owning a personal website and developing all the tools for sharing information yourself. That might be ok for a professional web designer, but not yet for most people. In contrast, Facebook and MySpace make it easy to share structured information. Want to share your favorite books? Just type their titles and the site creates a list, linked to the books and other people who like them. To do this on a personal site you need to know HTML, JavaScript, and probably several different APIs for sites like Amazon.com. It’s hard to do even for people familiar with the technologies.
The right tools don’t yet exist for most people to create a useful and safe online networking experience. Setting up a website domain is easier than it used to be, and perhaps the nascent OpenSocial effort will make it easier for people to use the same tools on their personal sites as they can on Facebook and MySpace. But we’re still a long way from a state where owning and controlling your own information is as easy as letting someone else do it–and that’s dangerous.
—
1. After seeing the limitations and confusion of most sites’ privacy settings, as well as the way private profiles have ended up on the front page of newspapers and in court cases, that last one is probably pretty accurate. The rule of thumb many people use for email should also be applied to social networks: assume that anything you write, from any time, could show up on the front page of the New York Times.