Two weeks ago, my wife asked me if I knew about a particular Facebook setting. When she explained it to, I realized that I had no idea about it!
The setting is found when you click on the ‘Most recent’ tab, adjacent to ‘Top news’ just above your wall. When you open the ‘Most recent’ drop-down, the last option is ‘Edit options’ and inside this labyrinthine options boxes, you further open a 2-option drop-down which gives you under ‘Show posts from’ – (a) Friends and pages you interact with most and (b) All of your friends and pages.
This is interesting, because the default in my profile was option (a). So, Facebook tracks who I seem to interact with most and boosts their messages, over others, who may be important, but, using my interaction style, the system takes some decisions.
Why is this important? Because, in the past 3 weeks, I came across 3 of my friends who had no idea what I do/how I am…and I have no idea how they’re doing.
These are 3 friends from my college/my first job. All three are doing very well for themselves, good jobs…happily married…gorgeous kids etc. We are all connected on LinkedIn and Facebook. But we have hardly interacted on any of those platforms.
I mean, I post stuff. They post stuff. We see each others’ status updates and nothing much happens after that.
So, when I got 3 emails – yes, emails, go on…gasp all you want – from them asking for something/informing me of some personal update, I was surprised that I missed those on the online networks. On last count, I have 500+ connections on LinkedIn and about 390 friends on Facebook (yes, only 390, it’s a largely private space). So, there is a chance that I may have missed updates from these 3 at various points in time – they may have been updated at times when I’m not awake/active and Facebook anyway decides which updates I should see.
Despite being a online social person, all this worries me.
I have 1,608 contacts under my Gmail contacts. Many of them may have been added to the list simply because Gmail’s default setting is to add all people I email, into the contacts. But considering the fact that I have been using Gmail as my primary email ever since it launched (and Yahoo…and Hotmail…before Gmail), I still have a lot of relevant people connected on my email.
To be fair, Google did try to dig into this by making a spectacularly stupid product called Google Buzz…to carve a social network out of my email contacts. But it doesn’t work that way, does it?
If I had to speak to my dad, I don’t go and stand in my balcony and shout to someone inside the house, ‘Dad, Have you heard? The King’s Speech won Best Picture. Don’t we love to hate that film?’. Now, besides my dad, the entire apartment complex hears me shouting that too, but it was meant to my dad alone. I go into the house, into my room and dad enters the balcony and shouts, ‘Yeah…and we thought that Zuckerberg film deserved it more, eh?’.
The point is, that is precisely how we seem to be interacting with each other on Facebook. Why shout, when we can speak to each other? The act of public conversations between 2 people is massively silly. But that is what we seem to be indulging in, more often. Online networks definitely have their benefits, if we consider the exhibitionist advantages – pride, showcase intelligence, showcase humor sense etc. But, there are times when a private conversation is needed, aided by social networks/tools or by other, real-life options. For some reason, the option to send a direct, one-to-one communication on those networks doesn’t seem to be that frequently used. Twitter DMs are used often, no doubt, but darn that 140 character limit!
So, this is what I’m going to do, in the next few weeks. I’m going to take a serious look at my Gmail contacts and a make a new list of it to add people who matter to me, regardless of whether they are connected to me on other networks or not. And I’m going to write them an email about what is happening in my life after spending good time in crafting that mail to make it sound really interesting – that is, in my view, a start to opening up communications afresh, at a one-to-one level.
Considering that the list is going to be easily 200 to 300+, I’m forced to send it as a BCC, to all, in one stroke, but it will still not be the same as a Facebook update. I’m going to use this technique and mail merge that email of mine, to add some layer of personalization to the recipients.
This is long overdue. It’s time I took over my connections and not let myriad online platforms assume things about how I want to interact. Something tells me this is going to be totally worth the time I’m investing in it.
How are you doing on this front? All connected and up to date? I’m curious if I’m the only one with this situation! I do understand that is also a ‘age-thing’…younger people, who have all their connections on a platform like Facebook couldn’t care less for what I have written above. But I’d perhaps urge them to read this 10 years from now 🙂