blog | con/text

The next big thing or the next nothing?

Being in the field of online media, I often learn about the “next big thing” pretty quickly after it comes out. The only problem is that, most of the time, the next big thing turns out to be something that didn’t quite go over how some folks had expected. I remember when I first heard about Twitter, I immediately signed up signed up because I figured within a week, all of my friends would be on it and that would become the means by which we communicated the most (this was before Facebook became so dominant). I also initially misunderstood what Twitter offered. I thought it was a service where you’d post “Hey, I’m at such and such coffee shop” then your friends in the area would drop by if they were around. Well, it wasn’t that – though that does exist now with Foursquare and Facebook places (if that one ever really takes off).

All that to say, Posterous is now being touted as that “next big thing” because it allows you to communicate across all the other social network and blogging platforms via email. I’ll admit, it sounds pretty sweet. And it’s one of those things that, even if it doesn’t catch on, may still prove very useful to me. I guess we’ll see.

(p.s. This is my first test-post via Posterous.)

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Addendum:

I guess there are certain dangers and pitfalls to being on the frontier of new technology services. I will tell you this: DO NOT create a Posterous account. I”m not sure exactly what it was doing, but within thirty minutes of me giving the site permission to access this WordPress blog and my Tumblr account, both of them were frozen. I couldn’t even log in to them. Finally, after two hours and a number of page refreshes, I was finally able to log in and change my passwords. Once I did that, both accounts started working perfectly again. I honestly didn’t even know it was possible for a third-party app like that to freeze you out of your accounts even when you try to access them through their own site login pages. And, another thing is that Posterous doesn’t allow you to delete your profile after you created it without emailing them to request the removal of your account.

Despite sounding like a great tool, I’m afraid something fishy (or phishy) is going on there. Moral of the story: don’t use Posterous. Or the moral might be that I should stop signing up for accounts on more sites.

Posterous. Hmpf. More like prePosterous. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

2011: 03/04
CATEGORY: Uncategorized
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Personal/Professional

As the tide of social media sweeps fully into the business sector, the lines between personal and professional are getting blurred, especially in a position like mine as an online media coordinator. I’ve always kept my online identity in the semi-public (yet mostly private) sphere. I mean, total strangers have been reading my various blogs for years—but a stranger reading my blog is quite different than my boss and co-workers reading it. Which I kind of feel weird typing because they may read this.

And that’s just the catch. I’ve had personal blogs for years, but now I need to be able to share my blogging in the professional realm to prove that I know a thing or two about it. And I can’t very well share the blog where I make all kinds of candid confessions. Now it’s extending to Facebook too. I manage two Facebook pages for my organization. To get administrative access to them, my boss had to add me as a friend first. That wasn’t actually much of a big deal because my current boss is young and cool and would not judge me professionally because I might have a couple photos of me acting silly on my Facebook page. But if she wasn’t … that’d be a different story.

As I get more and more business-minded, I want to use my Facebook page as a promotional tool of my “brand” where I can follow other social media professionals and writers and comment on their updates and links and whatnot and not worry about them viewing my profile and finding an off-color joke from one of my friends posted right at the top. (Not that such a thing happens frequently, but it’s a possibility.) Or even worse—if I made a status update that seems politically or religiously inflammatory for anyone who doesn’t fully know my stance on the issue.

Hence: dilemma. If I make my Facebook page professional, then my friends will have little or no interest in it and will not get to know about any of the quotidian details of my life that Facebook is so great for announcing. If I keep it personal, my colleagues will likely learn more about me than I want them to.