Tag Archives: Social Media

How I went from news avoider to a news junky in just 11 years.

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I used to be one of those people who never read the news or watched it on TV or paid attention when it interrupted the music on the radio station. It was too depressing and not all that interesting and had nothing to do with me.

And then I met Simon. And he is a news junky. He reads blogs and newspapers online and off and Twitter feeds and links and so on and so forth. He reads hard news, satire, right wing, left wing, moderate. Northern Irish, English, Scottish and American. And others. He thrives on information.

And I caught the bug. Not right away or all of a sudden but gradually I began, at least, reading headlines. And Twitter blurbs.

Photo source: http://www.contenthook.com/

And then US politics got interesting as now President Obama and Hillary Clinton faced off for the Democratic Presidential Nomination eight years ago.

And so I started downloading apps to read news on. And bookmarking news sites.

And got hooked on knowledge.
Which isn’t surprising as I’ve always enjoyed learning things I want to learn.

And so I too am now a news junky. Not perhaps to Simon’s level, as he shed a tear when TeleText went off the telly (may be a slight exaggeration), but enough to be informed as to what is going on in the world.

So are you a junky? An avoider? Somewhere in the middle?

Yes, Okay, I’m Going On About This A Bit

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But the more I use the new Facebook, the worse the design becomes.

I thought I was growing used to the badly chosen colours, and then I opened it this morning and it was like having a bucket of water thrown over my head. GOOD MORNING TEE, LOOK AT HOW BRIGHT AND UNFORGIVING YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE IS NOW is what it said to me.

And then I realized something else. I said yesterday that moving the notifications etc to the right served no purpose but I could live with it.

I lied.

Moving the notifications etc to the right did something that only occurred to me this morning: it breaks the first rule of page layout: Upper Left To Lower Right.

Like it or not, Facebook and others who think they are being ‘radical’, but the English language reads from left to right. And that means that, by training from the first moment we are taught to read or the first time we open a book even before we can read, if we learn in a left to right written language, we automatically look to the upper left corner of anything we look at to find the beginning or the most interesting information.

Facebook has apparently convinced themselves that the most interesting information on their page is…their logo and the search box. Really?

So, in fine Facebook form, they have continued to not think about their users and continue to think only about themselves.

Yes, okay, we don’t pay for Facebook. They have advertisers who do. I get that, I really do.

But why alienate people? Because if people stop using Facebook?

Advertisers will go away.

The Design Trend That Gives Me A Headache

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First it was Google Reader: glaring white with a bit of grey. So I moved to NetVibes.

Guess what? Then it was NetVibes: glaring grey with a bit of white and some black. Although not quite as bad as Google Reader. I can still use NetVibes.

Now? It’s Facebook. Grey boxes on a light grey background and, let’s not forget, the Facebook Blue upper menu bar.

Why?

Has the internet run out of colours? Did I miss a memo that said ‘Sorry, only grey, black and white will be allowed from now on’?

It, seriously, gives me a headache. It glares. It doesn’t flow. The eye gets stuck trying to figure out where on post ends and the next begins, never mind the columns.

It is bad design.

I can live with Facebook moving the various alert, notification and message icons to the right. I don’t really get the point, but I can live with it.

I’m not sure I can live with the grey on grey.

It really is giving me a headache.

UPDATE: Just after I posted this I updated to WP 3.8.1. And look at that! Black! Lots of black! The posting box is grey on grey, true. But the edges? A nice soothing black. Well done WP.

Why my Twitter and my Facebook are connected

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I read, all over the place, that they shouldn’t be. That the two should be completely separate because they are different tools.

I disagree.

I find I get a lot more interaction on Facebook than on Twitter. Oh sure, people respond to me on Twitter or Favourite a post or re-Tweet. But not nearly as much as they do on Facebook.

So I send my Twitter feed to Facebook.

I could, of course, post to Twitter and then post again onto Facebook. But I’m lazy.

Why use Twitter at all then? Because I like the challenge, really, of figuring out what I want to say in 140 characters without using much, if any, TxtSpk. I like language and playing with language and Twitter can sometimes be like a big jigsaw puzzle of odd sentence construction to get my thoughts out.

I do use Facebook on it’s own as I sometimes have things I need to say in more than 140 characters. But I always feels slightly bereft that I do, as I feel I’m leaving my Tweeps out and making them miss my brilliance. Maybe I should link back…

I do have an exception to this rule. I never send my Mumsnet Belfast Tweets to Facebook or vice versa. Because it’s not me. It’s a page and company I represent and I do use Twitter and Facebook differently on a corporate level.

So why have I combine my company and my personal?

Designed to a Tee’s Twitter and Blog were stagnating. I made the decision it was better to put my personal life into my public life and, maybe, get some personal connections interested in what I do professionally. Networking, in other words.

Because the number one of rule of Social Media? If you’re not using it? There’s no point in having it.

By the way, if  you hear a small explosion from Scotland in the next hour or two, it’s probably my friend and fellow SM expert’s head exploding as she believes the complete opposite of what I put here. Sorry Lynn. 😀