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My solution (since you asked what I would do!) is not to use fb professionally at all. I'm not sure that the use case you represent was ever considered by the fb gnomes, though you and others like you had to happen to facebook eventually.
For the miniscule amount of professional stuff I do online, I use linkedin and email with a vcard attached, plus a google site I created as sort of an online business card. Even if I were to dramatically increase my use of the web as a professional nexus (something which I could do but have chosen not to do for now), I probably wouldn't even consider facebook as a possible solution. This is mostly because I don't really like facebook all that much, though it's definitely proved useful in reconnecting with some important real life friends that I'd lost touch with over the years and multiple moves.
It is clear that it will be a while before Facebook or FriendFeed address all of these issues, but short of hiring my own developer in India to create a fix, I will have to keep finding workarounds like this one.
Hope you found this helpful.
with myspace at one time too - right before I left them for facebook!
Thanks for expressing EXACTLY the same problem I run into when using FaceBook.
I've seriously thogt about the (poor!) option of unfriending anyone who is not
a relative or a personal real world friened. But that sucks too much, as I'll miss some
cool stuff I see form my sorta-kinda virtual friends (and even some strangers)
I hope they listen to you.
Be well.
ron k jeffries
I think the only partial solution to this right now is to create a professional "Page." What's the difference between a Page and a Group? I'm not sure. I doubt most people know either. Unfortunately news and updates from any Groups or Pages you follow require you to go to that Group or Page to view updates. That seems like a major fail as well (even Yahoo Groups can do better than that). It’s basically a half-baked attempt at more focused updates, but I don’t think it solves the major problem of providing Personal vs. Professional aspects of a person (which IS important).
Thank you for covering this!
really useless for this purpose, too.
to was members of select corporations...so they did indeed intend
people to use it professionally -at least at that time.
you've made some great points. thanks for sharing. my approach is one that you've rejected, but it works extremely well for me—for the time being: while I'm all over umpteen-dozen social networks, the only one where I'll only friend people I actually know personally or have met in the flesh is Facebook. i really do believe that you have to separate church and state, and this approach has helped me keep my connections "clean" and clearly delineated. when i'm on FB, it's all about who's had a baby, how's the college football team doing, did you hear about so-and-so, organizing a class reunion activity... you know truly social things that actually step out of cyberspace and into reality. all of the other social nets, for me, are more abstract, educational, informational, or purely professional. and that works for me. but, as you've noted in your great post here, everyone's mileage may differ.
.LAG
.LAG
"I have a 16 year old niece and I have to have her as a Facebook contact because I don't want to alienate my family. My niece loves to add my contacts because, like most 16 year-olds, she doesn't understand boundaries. My business contacts feel obligated to accept the connection because they worry that I may be offended. This puts me in the potential situation where I'm responsible for her behavior. The last thing I want is for my niece to send the CEO of a client a purple unicorn. So, I use a business network for business and a social network for my social life"
As most of my business contacts have teenage relatives they understand where I'm coming from and often times they will rethink their personal social networking strategy.
My main takeaway beyond enjoying your piece and generally agreeing with you is to respond to Bruce Lewis' comment: "FriendFeed hasn't fully addressed this issue either, though rooms help."
I actually think that FriendFeed's feature to essentially tag friends by Pesonal/Professional, etc. handles the ability to slice friends vs. professional life rather well. And the main differentiator there is that when you choose to respond on one "side" or another, you have the relative freedom of talking to a more segmented audience, as opposed to FB of course.
I agree with you re: FriendFeed - I find that it's very easy to categorize people into lists. But mostly, it serves a different purpose than Facebook so it's a network where I'm happy to follow everyone and let them follow me.
But I have found a solution ? 2 Facebook identities !
Little annoying (cause you have to login logout) but I check both with 2 separate widgets on my Netvibes page. I also keep 2 different emails to avoid confusion.
Jac , here the professional identity ;-)
As a result, I have been asking Facebook for nearly the same thing as your request for one-way friendships: let us be able to set reverse security settings for groups/friends. This would let me control what I could see of their updates in the same way I can control what they see of mine.
I agree with both .LAG and sreiser in separating professional and personal usage between Twitter/LinkedIn/etc and Facebook, although that might change if I could target specific news feed updates for particular groups, including have defaults set so that status updates from Twitter would only show to professional contacts.
twitter.com/luckylou
I mean, you can create a Friends List ("Exceptions") and add those friends to the Exception list. Then tell the Twitter app to not send to the Exception list. But you want to have granular level control of status I think? Outside of the Twitter Facebook app? Perhaps the key is to remember that Facebook is really an operating system - social network operating system - and that you can add a FB app to handle what you want. I think Secret Status does it. if you don't like those, well, go ahead and develop your own. :)
Wait are you saying I can specify in the FB/Twitter app which Twitter updates sync to which Facebook friends? I'll have to go look at it again, if so.
But I also want it to not sync any replies (Twitter updates beginning with "@") - that should be in the settings too.
The problem is that those who use FB professionally have to engage in 2-way friendships with people they don't really want to follow all that closely but who want to follow them for whatever reason. Eliminating that "random people" noise from your News Feed is a painstaking, manual process that doesn't even let you filter things out using FB's own lists feature - you have to enter in names one-by-one.
In any regard, solving the Twitter sync issue would be putting a band-aid on a big, gaping wound. IMHO, of course.
I don't know of any site/service/app that does this well yet, and most don't do it at all. But we need it, and as social media becomes ever more mainstream, and living online in general becomes ever more ubiquitous, we're REALLY going to need it. Certainly to manage the intricacies of the interconnectedness between personal and professional lives, but even for things like keeping those who aren't professionally techie safe. Already so many people reveal far more than they know or should, and don't even realize it.
Of course, we're humans, and humans are messy and random and emotional, so a part of most of us will be uncomfortable for some time with the idea of letting algorithms take over aspects of managing our relationships. But it will happen. Look at the divide between what teenagers are willing to post online and what people a couple decades older are willing to post. (And we've long since lost the battle of manually and cerebrally evolving fast enough to keep up with the demands of the technology we've built.)
I think once relationship management tools a) are created and done well, and b) once they come baked into social sites (so you set them up at the same time as you create your profile, for example), they will integrate into our lives, and these days of "manually add names to customized lists" will seem vastly more primitive than they already do. :)
commenting
about the same thing recently. It is definitely an issue that I believe Facebook has an uphill battle to overcome. I've long had a separate FB account for Business & Friends. Being an instructor I just found it the only way to separate my personal from my professional activities. However even doing this I've yet to see much if any in the way of business activity on FB. I've continued this over into most of my social network circles. However as some of the excellent comments above have mentioned, most people haven't taken the time to be so diligent with their media distribution.
How I handle my social media input seems to be like a torrential rapid lately; spiraling toward finding the most efficient way of handling things. However I think we'll see more applications look to ways of data mining aggregators; similar to Feedly. This has been my latest darling. I've always wanted to love Friendfeed, but it is just too fragmented for my liking. Feedly allows me to hone in on good discussion within Digg and FriendFeed without having to follow too many people in those applications directly. I think the comments to this post are indicative of the fragmented commenting that exists within Friendfeed. There are probably many other people that have reshared this blog in FF and have comments other than those listed in your FF comment section (about 10 according to my Feedly minibar..;)..). However judging by the number of comments posted directly on this blog as opposed to Friendfeed, it seems most people still like to come directly to the source; my preference still.
Let's hope the big networks get this dialed in pronto!
I think the professional users of Facebook make up a small enough number that Facebook is not too worried about offending them. I think that their business model relies on making that larger group of regular people happy and I can't say that I blame them. I'm a real estate agent and I've been tempted to put my listings on Facebook but have resisted the urge. I usually just Tweet a link to a new listing and that updates my status and that is about it for my property marketing on Facebook. I think it is better to connect with people and develop relationships with them and through notes, news feed post, and video let them get to know you. You can show off your real estate knowledge and your personality and when they need an agent they will find you.
The results? WE're not quite ready yet to have the same set of values online as we do offline
http://www.lorandminyo.com/the-linkedbook-exper...
The moral of the story is: Online relationships aren't the same as real world relationship. Failing to recognize that fact will lead to trouble.
Dennis McDonald
Alexandria VA
http://www.ddmcd.com
I feel your pain and have recently "moved" all my biz contacts from FB to LinkedIn. Many I was connected to on both platforms. It was quite painless to un-friend people actually, though it was time consuming. Here is the message I sent my biz contacts on FB:
Hi. I'm being bold and daring in the new frontier of Web 2.0 and making a
hard line between Facebook and LinkedIn. I'm doing FB personal and LI biz.
It's a grand experiment!
So please don't take the unfriend on FB personally. Let me know what you
think about this idea.
The responses to this were only positive and with completely understanding. Most were envious in fact they hadn't done similar sooner.
It's not too late.