Thing #4: Putting the WORK in Social Networking

At my last job I had to be quite covert about logging into social networking sites, so of course I was quite happy to come in today and find out I was expected to do so for work. Thanks, ACL!

Bebo's First

This is the one that I've not had much to do with. Friends of mine had invited me onto Bebo, but my account didn't last long - neither did my first MySpace account. Maybe I was in a dark place at the time, or maybe I wanted people to think I was.

So today I signed up quick-snap to Bebo and asked to be friends with the ACL profile (I have my fingers crossed that the answer is yes). I used Bebo's search function to look through my contacts for people who were already on Bebo and requested friendship. At the time of writing I have one friend! A cause for celebration!

I also uploaded a profile picture (not of me, but rather of a Russian jet). I couldn't work out how to "link to your blog or....you may want to link to something else.", so I didn't. I can't see any function on Bebo for explicitly making external links. Scratch that, I've changed my mind - I'll make a "Links" section on my profile and put it there. Ingenuity!

I spoke too soon - Bebo's profile fields don't do anything good with HTML tags, so we'll stay linkless. I also won't be linking back to my profile from here, as my profile is private and has not direct URL. Sorry, potential stalker-friends!

Next up: MySpace

I had a personal profile on here back before the News Corp takeover. Then things got out of hand, right. Like, well mental. I deleted my account, but later came back to it because I felt like me musical side-project needed exposure. The kind of exposure having 40 friends on a site where most people have thousands.

Actually, just recently someone from Germany found my profile and songs, and made a friend request. I accepted, and she posted a comment calling my song an ohrwurm (lit: ear-worm). One of those catchy tunes you can't get out of your head. My work here is done.

"Try adding some images to your blog": I wasn't quite sure whether this meant adding images to a MySpace account, or linking to photos on MySpace here, or some other permutation. I've settled for sticking the following image here, which is also hosted on my MySpace profile:

Lovely.

MySpace is a chaotic place, although I do post bulletins and gig info there. And read those of others. Sometimes.

And then there was Facebook

This is where the cool kids be at, or at least that's what everyone on Facebook is telling themselves. I see there's a group on there now for people not born in the 1980s (as this group claims 90% of the users of Facebook are).

I think the coolest thing about Facebook is Scrabulous. Another important thing to remember: set you default network as the one in which you have the most friends. Sure, you just moved to a new school and want to acknowledge the fact. But only having a teacher and one other person as the friends on your profile page is a little sad. If in doubt, default to your country.

Facebook seemed a little broken today, so I couldn't search for any of my fellow ACL workers. I'll rectify that soon.

And now I depart! Thank you for joining me on my social networking journey.