Application Fever

For a couple years now, I have found the ever-expanding barrage of applications on social networking sites annoying and distracting. This post explains why LinkedIn users in particular should tread carefully with app integration.

Facebook Provenance

I maintain that I (and most of my generation born in the late 1980s) have a unique view on Facebook. I started college in the first year Facebook became a household (/dorm-hold) name. It was summer 2005: I was preparing to depart for my freshman year at college. Ironically, my impetus for FB derived from a high school classmate who began balding at 18. Known for being born a middle-aged Republican man, we joked that Dan had a mild case of progeria (remember that movie Jack? I don’t either…)

Anyway, “Uncle Dan” mentioned his Facebook wall at a gathering, and somehow, already, the esoteric, club-like nature of early Facebook was obvious. I felt it in the air. So I did not admit my ignorance and later looked up this mysterious wall at home.

Flash forward a year- I’m on the Facebook; everyone is on Facebook. And suddenly Mark announces that photos will now be part of Facebook. People were upset. This was an invasion of privacy! Well, at least you knew that only .edu email addresses could register for accounts, so worrying about future employers seeing images of you doing a kegstand were moot.

Eventually, more and more apps arrived. Superpokes (what is a poke in the first place, really?) and then Mafia Wars, Farmville, etc. Causes. Gifts. You name it. All along, I hesitated to allow even basic apps to access my information. Something about clicking that green Allow button felt risky. Or like a snowballing departure from the original point of Facebook.

Despite my heavy FB privacy settings, I still maintain professionally acceptable candor, just in case. But I view it differently than people who were already mid-careers when it hit. I was about 18 when Facebook got popular. It surpassed MySpace and is now Number 1 for social media. My point is that despite having a few periodical schema-adjustments as new apps and new kinds of users were allowed on the site, I still see it as a friends/family social tool and not as one I have to seriously worry about using as a representation of my professional self. (Granted, the internet is the internet. Never overestimate your privacy anywhere.) Alors, the great solution is LinkedIn.

My parents (Baby Boomer, tech-savvy entrepreneurs who work extensively online) recommended LinkedIn c. 2008. I had heard of it but did not yet understand its greatness. The point is that this time, W.O.M. ensured legitimacy, unlike Uncle Dan’s mysterious “wall.” This simply triggered mystique (a la the fascination triggers by Sally Hogshead), but LinkedIn was prestige and power.

In my mental map of social media trashiness formality, I revere LinkedIn as shirts tucked-in, words spelled correctly, and tattoos mostly covered, (or at least tasteful and only displayed at “young” companies). However, LinkedIn does have Casual Friday: you can post your status updates and even share books you are reading via an Amazon application. But obviously, you don’t share cheap romance novels or guilty pleasure reads- you share professionally-relevant content from which your colleagues could benefit. In kind, you don’t post tweet-worthy or Facebook status-worthy content on a LinkedIn status update. It is simply not the venue. Furthermore, no one on LinkedIn is interested in where you checked in for lunch or how you just dethroned the mayor of Starbucks. Back up- what do I mean by venue?

Social networking sites are different for a reason. They are not unique in the ways I have just described so that you can meld them all together and eradicate the point of their specific uses. Chris Brogan is right: Do not post your tweets on LinkedIn. #in exists for a reason. Specify a column in TweetDeck or Hootsuite for Foursquare so you don’t have to actually tweet every checkin.

The theme is that players who joined the game at awkward times have no appreciation for the early iterations, and thus get confused about which new developments to take advantage of, and which to acknowledge as trigger-happy social media miscegenation, if you will.

Disclaimer: The rules of social media are evolving everyday and there is no one authority on how to behave.