Social Networking and Me

I finally succumbed to it: I am now socially networked. People can find me and sing "Happy Days" because of it.

I'm uploaded and it feels somewhat comfortable.

I decided that this blog will be the center of my networked self... my soul, if you will. So, I did some redecorating, with some help from Blogger/Blogspot new templates, hope you like it. If everything goes well, maybe the list of readers will go up from three to, I don't know, five? six? One can only be so lucky, hehe. And if it does, I want the place to look nice. The blue background with gray letters theme was getting too uptight and it actually hurted my eyes when reading it for long periods of time; considering the length of some of my posts, it would've had to be dealt with at some point anyway.

Next, I checked in the obvious places for a start: Hi5 and MySpace. I already have profiles in both of them (see my links section on the sidebar), so there a source of inspiration and a source of copying and pasting for the other profiles I was about to open.

I also decided to put a link to my C.V. here. I already had it since around September 2006 up on my personal pages area that the University of Manchester gave me to play around with. I figured putting my C.V. up there seemed logical and so does linking it here: big change.

Then came the two big ones: Facebook and Twitter.

I still don't know what Facebook is. I know it has something to do with social networking, but its potential makes it much more than that. The possibility of uploading photos and pointing out who is actually in them was quite an interesting and elegant use of the MAP tag that I thought was going to be lost to deprecation. Naturally I found a couple of friends that I hadn't spoken to in ages, and I think I basically used everything I could from the site.

Unfortunately my mobile is based in the UK so no messaging from or to Facebook is going to be possible for now, and the emails for confirming my University's email took almost 8 hours to get to my inbox, making the process a little boring. I did my badge and put it up in here; I know, it's quite small, without a lot of information. The thing is that I didn't find a lot of options which I felt comfortable posting in a website and putting out there for our friends the phishers. If anybody should want to look further into me, I suggest that you go into Facebook for more info. I think I have pretty much anything you want to know about me in there (even this blog is being fed in there), and at the same time I feel protected. The badge does have my most recent photo uploads which I find nice to the eye, and, if you click on the photo, it will take to the original upload (after you log in, of course).

I did another badge with more information, but in a dynamic image (more difficult to phish off from); both of these options are given by Facebook itself, by the way. I might add it to my email or forum signatures, although I'm not quite convinced of using it yet. The fact that this little image is going to contact the Facebook servers everytime somebody reads one of my emails or forum posts doesn't really scream efficiency for the reader.

Another thing that I found, at first, interesting was that I could post a status message (sleeping, reading, at school, etc.), but I have to log in to Facebook to change it which is kind of a drag when you want to change it several times a day.

Enter Twitter... it's basically that feature but with much more ways to update it: from the webpage, messaging to an IM bot, or, the one that blew my mind, by texting to an specific number here in the UK. And it's free, which is always nice. If you click on the 'status' on the "More About Me" section, it will bring you to my Twitter section that'll show you all the differents status that I've posted. Basically, if there's a stalker out there, I'm doing the stalking for them: hey, remember, keep your friends close, but your enemies closer, hehe, (I have to see that movie!)...

Happy days indeed.