running with paper

I went to my first digital “meetup” in gosh – 1992? Meeting folks from a local Bulletin Board and hanging out at a burger joint. Fourteen years later, my employer issued their first “blogging guidelines” and I stopped working so hard to keep my online and offline worlds apart. But I still had a small wall there; careful about the information I shared online and the connections made (mostly).

Then late last year, I finally joined Facebook. I’d tried Friendster, and Orkut, and Plaxo and even LinkedIn. But not MySpace – it hurts.

I held off on Facebook because people weren’t there at first, and because it was still “too open”. And even with privacy updates, just being there got you plugged into applications that your friends chose to use – not you chose – that your friend chose. And I didn’t like that. It was hard to “opt out”, unless you simply stayed away.

So I stayed away. The final “switch” for me got flipped after my layoff earlier this year. Time to use Facebook for more than keeping up with my friends near and far. And I wanted to get more into blogging, both for personal and professional reasons.

I eventually went so far as to violate one of my own “online safety” rules: I gave Facebook access to my Gmail logins – personal and professional. Though they don’t save your password, they do save the email addresses you import, unless you deliberately delete them.

Shortly thereafter, I started getting strange friend suggestions that I dismissed it to probability – XYZ knows “Leah”, so it thinks I should, too. Then I started seeing names of people I’d only met professionally – and realized my error in leaving those names in the system. I’d see them as a contact, and they’d see me. Whoops.

Not a fatal error, and not too embarrassing. Since I don’t spend time drinking to excess, vomiting in the bushes at local dance clubs, or up on tables doing amateur strip shows, it was just my little cartoon smile out there, puzzling people.

Don’t import your contacts unless you really want them all in there; or put the ones you do want in there by hand, one at a time.