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Posts tagged ‘Facebook’

Mar 28

google plus profile, google+ profile, google plus authorship, social networking
66 Comments

Off With My Head on Google Plus!

Another post that will qualify for the Laziest Blogger of All Time Award.........

Several people forgot my birthday. I'm not mad about it. But, when a couple of them mentioned it to me, they blamed Facebook for not reminding them. (Incidentally, I removed my birthday from every public service several months ago when I got the word that my social security number was stolen in the hack on the idiotic State Government of South Carolina. But, that is another story for a day when I don't feel fuzzy.)

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Nov 14

32 Comments

Doing What I Don’t Want To Do

Right now, life for me is a series of wait-and-see. Hurry-up-and-stop. Sit on my hands to keep from chewing my nails.

You get the idea.

My novel-in-progress is out with my A readers, and I’m at loose ends. It’s hard to give up a child for two weeks without wondering how she’s faring. Especially when one knows that child is far from perfect. I still have at least one more revision before giving it to my editor in January, but new eyes help my eyes work better.

So, I’ve spent this week doing all sorts of things I put off. Because the things I procrastinate tend to have to do with technology, I have been on a slow descent into hell. A sample, and you may laugh AT me, because there’s no laughing WITH me:

  1. Updating my contacts. Now, this may sound like an easy project, but this is ME. I never, ever, EVER update my contacts. EVER. Gmail saves email addresses and lets me just enter the first few characters for a reason, right? Thousands upon thousands of email addresses, and only a milli-fraction assigned to a contact.
  2. Aaaaaaaaand, since I’m already screaming, I decided to merge all of my ancillary contacts from other networks. I’m tired of services like Facebook changing the rules on me, and I want to have a master contact list that I control. At least, I THINK I still want that. I’m only about a tenth of the way through my friend list. By the time I’m done, I may have transmogrified into a volcanic eruption.
  3. But hey, I already have hundreds and hundreds of pretty contacts.
  4. AND I REALLY DON’T GIVE A #%$^#&@*#&$%^ ABOUT THAT.
  5. But, I know I should…….
  6. So, I decided to pile it on even thicker and upgraded my iPhone this week. I even read the freaking instruction manual word-for-word before I turned the thing on…….AND IT ARRIVED WITHOUT A FREAKING SIM CARD INSTALLED.
  7. While I was cursing Verizon and Apple and all tech people period, MTM suggested that, since I was plugging my iPhone in for the first time in two years, I might as well upload my thousands of photos to Flickr. If anyone wants to see how that’s going, click here.

Will anyone declare it Sippy Time? Is it Five O’Clock somewhere? Have I finally learned my lesson that keeping up with this stuff a little at a time beats days-long bouts of torture??????

May 31

34 Comments

How to Kill Facebook

This week, Facebook rolled out a heap of additional changes to their Facebook Pages platform. In the midst of writing my heart out in honor of my Dad, and with all my Facebook page growth indicators UP, they took away 15% of my reach in one day.

I learned back in September that relying on Facebook for ANY exposure was stupid, and I diversified. Yet, I still get traffic from Facebook right now, and when they make changes, it is demoralizing to someone who blogs from the heart and makes no money for it.

Thanks to Tricia Driscoll at Critters & Crayons, I found the skinny on a possible workaround FOR NOW. I’ve copied her verbiage below and added some of my own. If you have a Facebook page and have been pulling your hair out, I hope this helps you recapture some of your hard-earned Likers without paying Facebook. If you like my page, following the instructions in the link below will help you see my individual posts, at least in the short-term.

New Changes To What You’ll See In Your Facebook News Feed…If you’ve liked a page, you may not see it unless the page administrator pays to promote each individual post. (And, within six months, you WILL NOT SEE IT EVER unless they pay – that’s my prediction.)

This is a helpful article about how to create lists of pages you would like to include in your newsfeed. I just created mine. If you already Like Andra Watkins – Author #1 THANK YOU, and #2 Please consider adding my page to a list. Here are excellent directions on how to not miss data from your favorite sites (even if mine is not one of them :) http://www.iheartfaces.com/2012/05/facebook-list-pages/

Regardless of what Facebook does in the future, you can help me and other hard working bloggers who are generating content you enjoy by doing any or all of the following:

  1. Subscribe to my blog by e-mail OR if you have a WordPress.com account, follow it there. If you have been reading blogs simply because you saw them in your Facebook news feed, you can no longer rely on Facebook to show them to you.
  2. Share individual posts you enjoy with your networks. Three or four shares a month on any platform can make a massive difference for a blogger, whether you have few connections or many.
  3. If you are a blogger, enable all sharing widgets. Don’t rely on the Facebook one alone. I share lots of content in my Twitter feed, and if you don’t have that widget enabled, I can’t help you as easily.
  4. If you’re on Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Stumble Upon or any other popular social media platform, connect with me there. Currently, none of those platforms limit the content you see if you are interested in seeing it. You may access my profiles in those platforms by clicking the highlighted links on each platform name above.
  5. Explore other platforms. As an individual user of Facebook, you can no longer rely on it to maintain your personal connections, keep track of the people you care about, or know what is happening in their lives. Your individual connections currently see less than 8% of what you post, and that number will continue to fall as Facebook tries to monetize in the wake of its disastrous IPO. Leading social media folks are predicting that Facebook will fold, because regardless of what they’ve tried to do to make money thus far, their per user revenue continues to plummet.

Whatever you do, I want you to know that I appreciate your reading my blog. It is a daily honor that so many people choose to spend time here, to share their stories, to make a community that adds so much to my life. Thank you for being here.

Mar 7

66 Comments

Facebook? Fleecebook!

If you use Facebook, and you believe that your identity is YOURS, then please read this post.

You may have heard that Facebook is preparing an initial stock offering. All those changes you’ve been noticing in recent months? The ones that make it impossible for you to decipher your own profile page? To find anyone you care about? To read anything that interests you?

Or, what about all the upgrades? Like, the ads you see EVERYWHERE? Or, the messages that tell you your friend so-and-so likes such-and-such, and why don’t you like it, too? Or, the ‘recent updates’ button in the newsfeed, that somehow converts itself to ‘top stories’ at random, inexplicable intervals?

According to this article in TechCrunch, your average personal Facebook profile post only reaches 12% of your friends. Wonder why you posted how you had herpes, and nobody cared?

12%.

You got engaged, and nobody congratulated you?

12%.

You were having a VERY BAD DAY and vented on Facebook, and most of your friends said…….nothing?

12%.

Business pages do not fare any better. Over the past year or so, businesses have been encouraged to have as many Likers (formerly Fans) as possible. Now, Facebook has downgraded their admission of viewership of business pages from 16% to the same 12% number as personal profile pages.

All those things you gave away to get people to like your page?

12%.

All that time you spent begging your friends to click the Like button?

12%.

All that money you paid to companies to help you build a base of Likers?

12%.

We need to take back ownership of our own identities, people. Facebook has made a business decision, for the benefit themselves and their pending shareholders, to become FLEECEBOOK, the Advertising Platform Formerly Known as Facebook. They are no longer a social network.

If you do not want them to know the varying size and color of your underwear, or the contents of your stomach without the benefit of an autopsy, or the color of your pubic hair, you need to change the way you use their platform. Because, let me tell you right now, they are mining EVERY SINGLE SOLITARY THING you click, you share, you read, you join, you play and you download, and they are connecting dots with EVERY SINGLE SOLITARY THING the people you interact with most do, and they are selling that information to EVERYBODY WHO WILL PAY FOR IT.

We have all agreed to have casual, unprotected sex with a very, very bad partner.

So, here’s what I propose.

Click on things you don’t really like at all just to screw with them. Share things you’d never read in a million years just because. Edit your ‘close friends’ list to be a random assortment of those friends you really hate, just to mess up the research they’re selling to advertisers about you. Only 12% of your friends will see any of this nonsense anyway, so why does accuracy really matter so much to you?

If we’re not sharing anything meaningful, Facebook is worthless to the very people who are about to become billionaires by selling the information we flippantly give away: information about ourselves, what we like, what we buy, what we do, where we go.

Take action to stop Facebook from Fleecebooking you.

Jan 19

35 Comments

Black Cat on My Birthday

I can’t say why I wear black. Despite being an architect by profession, I am not typically a ‘joiner’ and usually hew true to my independent nature. I’m not one to see the world in binary fashion–black or white—but revel in the complexity and contradictions of life, the Rationalist in me fully trusting that Wisdom lies in knowing how little you actually know.

As it turned out, my birthday– January 18–was one of black’s days in the sun: American Censorship Day. Websites all around the internet were blacked-out voluntarily, or wore a black banner in protest of a proposed regulation that would likely change the internet as we know it. While the Accidental Cootchie Mama had penned an effusive paean to MTM to run on my birthday, the coincident urgency of the black-out meant the homage had to wait, and the first web site I read every morning provided a tantalizing teaser without the tribute.

The silent black protest, however, was not complete. Beginning from the earliest hour, my blackberry tweeted and chirped with huzzahs and happy birthdays, the Facebook notification alert that I can’t seem to turn off, no matter how little I actually appear on any social media site. Far-flung friends and family fomented the future failure of the postal service, sending regards and salutations with nary a stamp. The black cloud lifted like a heavy eyelid, a squinting smile washing over the morning.

Birthdays tempt us to imagine that all of a day is for us alone, an ego-stroke that swells us up by a factor of 1/365th. Who would deny us our date to surf above the black depths of the sea, to sparkle like a supernova in the black night sky, if only for a nanosecond in eternity.

And with this elan I greeted the world, skimming rather than slogging to the salt mine. Zipping around the last corner before the office, a pair of green eyes pierced through an arched black penumbra: a black cat, petrified in my path. I maneuvered the Mini to the left; the cat cartwheeled to the right.

Close call, or perilous portend?

My hand on the wheel, or the hand of fate? For an instant, Rationality and Wisdom wither from the challenge of the black cat.

Each day we wrestle with our future, but even more so as we mark another lap in our race with time. It might be a solitary struggle, but when love speaks, we know we are not alone in it. I thank all who sent me birthday wishes, whether in a comment, on Facebook, by e.mail or text.

And I thank the love of my life for being by my side, being with me for the ride, and for the poignant paean that finally got published, banishing the blackness.

-MTM

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