When Social Networking Goes Wrong

I'm pretty sure you're familiar with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and whatever new social networking site that's going to pop up in the next 5 minutes. I'm personally on all of those for different reasons: many of my readers are on Myspace and Twitter while a lot of high school and college friends are on Facebook. Hell, I'm even on Linkedin for my professional contacts.

But I learned a valuable lesson today....who's really on my contact list because they want to keep in touch...and who's on it because they want dirt and gossip.

Over the weekend, I took the time to delete several people off my pages for various reasons: some people I don't even talk to and some who I tried talking to but didn't respond back. I also had to delete a few people just because they were just too negative for my taste and I can't deal with that right now. And then there were ones who I had no idea why they were on my friends' list to begin with since well, we didn't know each other. The older I get the less friends I have and the tighter my circle becomes.

So I had a friend call me earlier. As I'm sick, I text'd her I couldn't talk on the phone. She texts me back immediately with, 'Oh, I hope you feel better! I wanted to share some Facebook gossip with you!'

And then I started to wonder...am I really comfortable having all that information out there?

Now I purposely keep certain pictures and causes off my respective pages just because I know a HR representative from any company can take one look at my page and go, 'Nope, not hiring her no matter how qualified she is!' If you don't think your social networking doesn't play a factor in your jobs/careers, you best believe it does.

So back to my friend (you may remember her as Becky from a few posts back), she always tells me gossip about what certain people are doing. A vast majority is unsolicited, mind you. And I started to wonder, what is this person saying about me? Granted my pages are private but that doesn't mean anything. If you have enough friends in your circle, it comes very public within 5 minutes.

It reminded me of when someone asked when I was getting married a few weeks ago. I told her nothing was set in stone and that we were still re-arranging a lot of stuff. She then said, 'Well, so and so said you were getting married on this date.' Huh? We hadn't chosen a date at that point and we already had one? Like, seriously?

My fiancee is a smart man. He knows how to categorize his friends. He knows the people he can tell everything to, those he can tell a little to, and those he can't tell shit to. He also has the same social networking sites but doesn't really visit Myspace or Facebook unless he's commenting on someone's photo or reading my occasional blog. He's more of a Twitter guy. He likes to keep in the loop and make new online friends but if he doesn't, no big deal. He doesn't care about who's wearing what, who's doing who, or who did what to whom. Maybe many guys are like that.

Maybe I need to take note.