www.rebekahking.com

It’s been a longstanding fact that I self-label myself a geek when it comes to social networking. I’m a big believer in the power of the internet and in the transparency of the individual: meaning that I believe the more the internet allows private lives to become public, the less one can hide the reality of who they are.

If you’re a jerk, now the whole world knows it.
If you’re a nice person with jerk tendencies, now the whole world knows it.

Some people are freaked out by this, the merging of public and private lives, and often one must find a new set of boundaries (ie. stop twittering after 9pm – DUH!)

And often as these tools creep in to further degrade the private/public boundaries.. tools like myspace and facebook crossing over to LinkedIN, email, etc. We come up with more ways to waste time and to share our OCD with the world – tools like twitter and digg and del.icio.us

The trick in all this is balance – and one of the easiest ways to balance is to be a slow-adopter. Don’t necessary jump on every bandwagon… give it 6 months or so for the bugs to get worked out and the syncing tools to catch up. Sure you may miss a freebie here and there, but you’ll save yourself hours of headaches.

Take Myspace for example. I thought that tool was great and jumped right on… only to become a target for spammers of the world to unitedly blast. Every time I make an update, I get hit with half a dozen spammers… not to mention the porn and the current dramas in the news about kids publicizing their cruelty.

LinkedIN is one of my success stories. I signed up for it a year ago, but waited 6 months to really get into it… now it’s a huge tool for my networking and KIT systems.

Plaxo’s a 50/50 split… the plaxo pulse is a weak attempt to compete with other social networking tools, while the address book and calendar syncing tools remain unparalleled for those of us that have to sync home computer|cellphone|office|laptop and aren’t interested in thousands of duplicates.

So when in doubt – sign up but don’t email blast your address book immediately… sit around (aka “lurk) until you see a few friends in there, and then go forward. Always look for syncing ability to your existing technology tools, and never give up your right to wait.

Being the first one to adopt a new technology is very rarely worth being the first one to have a system crash.

Unless you’re in IT, of course.

Cheers,

Rebekah