The First Law of Social Networking

There’s an alarming trend racing around the Internet.

Actually, scrap that, this isn’t a trend. It’s been going on for a while and it needs to stop. It’s the fundamental flaw of social networks, human curiosity and gullibility, it is the Patient Zero of panic, hysteria and misinformation.

It is the breaching of the First Law of Social Networks.

Disclaimer: I’m not sure if there is an official set of laws regarding social networks, however, as far as Nate-Radio is concerned, this one needs more publicity.

The Law goes as follows:

Research before you Repost.

And it is a simple premise. It takes five minutes and it saves a lot of bad e-Chinese-whisper-like embarrassment. Here’s how you do it in five simple steps.

1.     Select the text of the article you are about to repost.

2.     Copy (Ctrl + C) the text.

3.     Open a new tab (Ctrl + T) and go to http://ww.google.com/

4.     Paste (Ctrl + V)

5.     Hit your Enter/Return button and browse the first page for the most legitimate looking site.

There are dozens of e-myth busting sites out there, snopes.com are reliable, it will take you literally ten seconds to find out if Ebola causes Zombies, Germans found definitive proof of the afterlife, You can lose fat by eating this one weird ingredient and every other outlandish idea that pops up in your feed. If you cannot find any subject hits for the main headline, try Googling the source of the article. Satire news-sites like The Onion and Viral Update make bank because people are unaware that every story they post is fake. A quick search of their website name will usually let you know if they’re legitimate news-sites or fakes.

Once you have confirmed your story is accurate (and only then) you are free to share, repost, retweet or do whatever it is your chosen network does to repost information. Up until then, don’t. Just don’t.

Please don’t.

Are Your Facebook Friends Worth A Dollar?

The other day I was washing the dishes and I was thinking about all the Facebook Friends I have who I rarely interact with: The people I sat across from during senior year Chemistry, the people I did a presentation with for one subject at University, that guy I worked with for six months in a warehouse or that girl who used to date my ex-housemate.

Midway through a dreaded cutlery, I had an interesting thought: What would happen if everyone on Facebook had to pay one dollar once a week for every friend they had. Clearly, it would never work. The e-Public would never allow such a travesty! However, it's interesting food for thought and it got me thinking about who I would pay a dollar to stay connected with. Obviously my family and close friends would come first, important people who I could contact for any questions about work and/or study would come second, but anyone more than that and I probably wouldn't be willing to hand over the cash. I went through my friends list and came up with roughly 50-55 people I would definitely be willing to pay $1.00 to have on my list but that was the extent of it.

So I am happy to pay $55.00 a week. That would cut my fairly conservative list of friends down by about 4/5ths, which actually really surprised me. Why? Because I'm pretty stingy about my Facebook anyway. I don't add people I haven't met and I routinely remove people I haven't spoken with in a long time. Some people might consider that rude, or somehow elitist- but really, if I'm not interested in that persons daily activities and they are not interested in mind, then I'm doing both of us a favour by cutting the connection.

So to discover that even with my specially selected and carefully maintained friend list, that 80% of them aren't worth more than a cheeseburger at happy hour to me, I was rather surprised. Imagine then the accounts of the 'e-social butterfly' with friends in the thousands of whom they have met less then half. Are those people really going to spend thousands of dollars each week for the sake of strangers? Doubtful.

It also brings an interesting question to mind about the quality of posts. If you knew people were paying their hard earned money for your updates, would you put a little more effort into them? Would you consider it well worth their while to pay for photos of your lunch? Or would you start having real opinions? Real observations? A dash of dry humour and wit in your occasional status update?

I know I probably would- after all- you get what you pay for!

So food for thought, comment if you feel inspired!

Hashtags on Facebook

Recently, I have noticed a trend of people ending their status updates with hashtags and I can't help but feel a little sorry for them. More on that later though, first, lets address exactly what a hashtag is.

The hashtag, is simply  a hash symbol (#) followed by a word or phrase combined without spaces or, in some cases, separated by full stops (e.g. #yolo, #iamswaggy, #hashtagging.is.hip). Hashtags were initially used in Internet Relay Chat as a way to categorize phrases for ease of use later when searching for that particular phrase.

The hashtag made its way to Twitter as a simple hack to group together posts under one phrase or topic until company heads noticed it catching on and wrote a nifty little software script that would recognize any time someone tweeted a phrase starting with a “#” and turn it into a link that would direct whoever clicked on it to  every other post out there containing that same hashtag. Suddenly, if you were #havingagreattime, you could click on your own hashtag link to see who else in the world was also #havingagreattime.

At its most basic level, a hashtag is simply a search- a label for a topic or a filter for a discussion.

Twitter isn’t the only site that uses hashtags though, additionally, hashtags are functional on YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+ as well as few other lesser known social websites.

You know who doesn’t use hashtags? Facebook.

And that is exactly where my sympathy for the poor souls hashtagging on Facebook lies. The poor folks who don’t understand what they are doing or why they are doing it. The poor kids that think it looks cool to fail at technology. It’s like watching your parents type “h-t-t-p-:-/-/-w-w-w-.” before every url. Watching the technologically challenged try to post status updates from their email. Listening to hipsters complain why they can’t have a profile song on their instagram account.

Basically, it represents a failure to understand technology- which wouldn’t be so bad if it was kept private, but the fact that these people are broadcasting their ignorance to everyone online….

...Well, that makes me sad.

A Whole New E-World

As of June 28, the newest buzz on the social networking horizon is Google+, the latest venture of the $46 billion internet giant by the same name (minus the '+'). Facebook, eat your heart out, after only a single day, Google+ beta-user invites were disabled due to sheer demand alone. Now, the closest thing you can get to an invite is an email waiting list, available for sign-up here.

So now, the interest is alight with the question "what happens next?". Like all social networking sites, Google+ will not become a viable source of 'social networking' until enough people are online to make updating worthwhile. Basically, Facebook would be useless if none of your friends had it and Google+ will be useless until it reaches a tipping point. Keep in mind this is less a matter of 'if' and more a matter of 'when', but what I'm interested in is Facebook. Specifically, will it be capable of living harmony with this new addition to Interweb, or will it do what Facebook did to Myspace?



What do you think Internet people?

Not Another Facebook Post!

Over the past few years, Facebook has become the standard by which most of us lead our social lives. It informs us of what is going on, when and where it is happening, who is going and whether or not that one person that might be attending is available.

It is a system that is continually updated to try and make it as flawless as conceivably possible and along with it has influenced a whole host of new pop-culture references. You couldn't 'like' something ten years ago.



You couldn't tell people you'd just met to 'Facebook' you. You certainly couldn't have said "that's totally going in my status" without at least someone thinking you were crazy. But you can now!

However, there is one new addition to the Facebook-Phenomenon that, to me, is bordering on taking things too far. It's the new 'Places' feature for iPhones (and probably most other phones soon too), where people can tell you where they are and you can click on that location and be provided with a map of their exact whereabouts.

Now, call me old fashioned, but isn't this just asking for trouble? That crazy old fellow who makes an account as some young, dashing stallion is now able to follow your Facebook and find out exactly where you are, right down to the name and number of the street.

It's a feature that, in my opinion, is not really required- I guess it could be useful for police looking to lure dimwitted thieves into their clutches by posing as a money bag or something- but for the general population, what's wrong with someone saying "I'm getting food here" without the additional option of posting a detailed street map for all to see?



That said, I neither own an iPhone nor have the finances available to invest in one, so in reality, the presence of a Facebook 'Places' feature has little real effect on how I live my life. I guess I'm just trying to be a Good Samaritan and keep you all safe from the dark and evils of Internet Predators.

Which brings me to my next point… There is totally a Facebook-Posting button ON my blog! I'm not sure if people are negligent of this feature or they just don't find these posts interesting enough to recommend to their e-friends, but I *can assure you that there is much to be gained by pressing this button and posting it to your social profiles…



*Disclaimer: This cannot legally be assured by Nate-Radio or any related parties.

It's fun to be clever.