Recently, I came across a mention of a site that parses your Twitter feed, and tries to locate the popular links being shared by the people you follow. It’s called Strawberry Jam, and, as of right now, it’s still in beta. (I do have a couple of invites, leave a comment if you’re inclined to check it out.)

It’s a nice little service for those days when you really don’t have time to follow along on Twitter much, but you still want to see what sort of links are being shared among your connections. The service, upon login, will grab a list of both the most popular links being shared, as well as the most recent links, show you who shared them, and allow you to mouse over their avatar to see what, exactly, they tweeted about it.

All in all, a pretty useful bit of technology!

Interesting food for thought from Forbes the other day, that has drawn quite a bit of attention around the online world. What Prospective Employers Hope to See in Your Facebook Account.

The chart displaying the reasons candidates were rejected has obviously gotten the most attention, but the other chart, about what they saw on a social networking profile that made them hire someone is probably more worth looking at.

The interesting thing on the reasons candidates were rejected graph, to me, was the 11% rejected due to their profiles demonstrating poor communication skills. That’s not something we really tend to think about, we tend to focus more on the wildly inappropriate photos, or comments, but it does make sense. If your resume touts your brilliant writing skills, and yet you are constantly using poor grammar in your posts, don’t seem to know the difference between “there”, “their” and “they’re”, or simply can’t seem to put together a coherent sentence on your FB profile, should they believe your resume, or what you write every day? There’s nothing quite like the frustration of working with someone who cannot communicate well, and there’s nothing quite as embarrassing to an organization than an employee who cannot write professionally. Giving employers evidence that you might just be a poor, unprofessional communicator, gives them a reason to look for another candidate. In this economy, it only takes one reason to rule you out of the pile of potential hires.

On the flip side, we see that the things that employers like to see on your profile are things like good communication skills, creativity, a bit of personality, etc. Obviously, if you take the time to cultivate a more professional image on your social networks, it helps show off the skills your resume is bragging about.

In my experience, nothing says you are passionate about your field like using social networking to both learn more about, and share your own knowledge, of that field. Even more, if you are sharing information about your field, and writing about your field, prospective employers have a whole catalog of writing samples to show them just how well you can communicate in writing, about the exact topics you would be communicating about in the position. That’s not a bad thing to have out there.

Just a little something to think about the next time you post something to Twitter or Facebook, good writing matters.

I’ve been critical of Google Plus, but after seeing how Facebook is stepping up their game, making friends lists easier, and letting people subscribe to things I make public on my profile without having to be confirmed friends with me, I think maybe I should thank Google for pushing the limits and giving FB some competition.

This does go to show that competition brings out the best in services, and encourages innovation, which is good for everyone, no matter which service you use most.

Personally, I’ve always used friend lists, so that feature is nice, but not earth-shattering. The subscription feature is also interesting, though I wonder if I make my blog posts public on Facebook as they get pulled in to my Facebook profile through RSS Graffiti, is there any point to having a fan page for it any more?

Yes, for the child abuse site, where they don’t get pulled into my personal profile, the fan page is still the best option, but maybe there’s no point in having one for a site who’s feed gets pulled into a personal profile. What do you think?

I saw a post on Google Plus today by Niki Black, that resonated with me.

You’d better roll out some new things ASAP Google+ or you’re going to tank. Allow 3d party developers access to your API so I can post to Google+ from my feed readers. Or I’m going to stop cross-posting because it simply takes too much time. I really mean it this time. Engagement and activity are dropping rapidly as each day passes. Incorporate a few major changes and do it…NOW!

It resonated with me because it really echoed something I had thought about over the long holiday weekend. I was back in Ohio, and busy with weddings and spending time with my wife, over the weekend. I didn’t spend a lot of time online, in fact, the only online access I bothered with was my iPhone. I looked at Twitter, I looked at Facebook, I checked email, and opened a few other apps. I didn’t open Google Plus. I didn’t really think I would miss anything by not checking it, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t actually. Granted, it’s early, but it’s starting to get the Wave/Buzz feel to it, lots of hype and then a quick fizzle.

When I first critiqued Google for rolling out a social network without an API so that you could cross-post easily, I was told, no worries, they’ll add that. That was more than 2 months ago.  It still doesn’t exist. Two months ago, I was hopeful that Google would continue to grow Plus, but it’s basically still the same service it was then. (Oh they added Games, which was a feature everyone hated about Facebook to begin with!) They grew in popularity and promised us that as the network grew they would be rolling out new features, and planned to do great things with it, but it hasn’t really happened yet. Sure, two months isn’t a long time, but this is the internet age, our attention span just isn’t that long. Besides, after basically doing that exact thing with Wave and Buzz, Google needs to do better with Plus. We’ve been down this road before with Google, big promises of changing the way we do social networking, only to leave us with half-developed tools.

So, Google, you’ve gotten our attention, now show us something. We’ve got plenty of other options if you don’t.

It would appear that they are, and this is, frankly, a good thing.

Obviously, making the limited sharing features that already existed in Facebook but were difficult to find upfront and center, in the same way Google did with Circles, is a direct response to the growth of Plus. What’s also obvious, is that Google will have to continue to roll out new features to keep Plus from going the way of Google Wave. Facebook already has the community, it already has your connections, and now it’s also making the features people love about Plus available just as easily.

Facebook has a ton of advantages over Google in this space, simply because of the user base. Google Plus’ growth has been impressive, but they still don’t compare when it comes to the potential audience, and number of connections available to you, let alone the established history of communication that you already have within the Facebook platform.

Plus has a lot to overcome, can Google be truly innovative enough to sustain the growth they’ve seen when Facebook has the 800lb gorilla of an established, and much larger user community?

Earlier today, I caught site of an interesting blog post thanks to Niki Black.

A Box You Want to Uncheck on LinkedIn

Apparently, LinkedIn has followed in Facebooks footsteps, and automatically enabled a feature that lets them use your information and image in advertisements on the site.  (As well as some other defaults to allow their marketing partners to contact you, etc. )

Go ahead, take a look and fix your settings, then come back……

Anyway, the popular comment that I’ve seen about this is that LinkedIn should have learned from when Facebook has done this and gone a different route.

I think they did learn from Facebook, and what they learned is that they’ll take a bit of a beating in the online world, but it will pass in a couple of weeks. They also learned that 90% of the people who use LinkedIn won’t ever notice that this change has been made, and even those who do and get upset about it, over 90% of them aren’t about to delete their accounts. Not having a LinkedIn account is professional suicide in 2011. So LinkedIn will take a little bad PR, but in the end nothing will really happen to them, and the vast majority of folks will leave their settings unchanged from the default, and LinkedIn will rake in some money from marketers who want to use that.

Meanwhile, over in the Facebook camp, they’ve done this so many times that people are now completely freaked out over things that they haven’t even done. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that there’s been a rash of people freaking out because Facebook has “published” all the phone numbers stored in their phones. In reality, what Facebook has done is synched your contacts from your phone, with the FB mobile app, the same way it uses your Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo contacts to try and find people you might know on Facebook. In each case, the user has asked them to do this, without really thinking about the fact that Facebook would hang on to that contact data in order to continue to help find people you might know. So, your phone contacts are stored there, but they are not “published” on Facebook, you are the only one who can see them.

Of course, with Facebook’s reputation for setting everything on by default and making you opt out, most people do not even question that Facebook has published their phone numbers to the world at large. Yet, they stay on Facebook, for the same reason that people will stay on LinkedIn. If you want to be connected, you have to be. It’s too much work trying to build a network without these tools. (Twitter and Google Plus, eventually, will fall in this same category.)

So, until someone comes along and builds a better mousetrap, you’ll be at the mercy of these companies and their attempts at making a profit off of their membership. Even when someone does, unless you want to build your own, you’ll be at their mercy too. (see Google Plus…)

Or, Why you want to come visit!

Thanks to friends pointing out these stories on Facebook and Twitter!(And people say they don’t learn anything important in social media?)

How A Park Helped One Town Weather The Recession
Southern U.S. distillery to legally sell moonshine

By the way, my favorite part from the latter story:

The area was settled, along with the nearby Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, by Scots, Irish and Welsh who migrated down through the Appalachian mountain chain from Pennsylvania in the 1700s.

“They thought it was their inalienable, God-given right to make whiskey,”

Yup, those are my people!

So, if I used Photosync to automatically sync photos I upload to Flickr with Facebook, and then used Move2Picasa to copy my Facebook photos into Picasa/Google Plus, I could pretty much share my photos with people no matter where they follow me, right?

The larger question is whether it’s worth my time and effort though. As of today, I’m not convinced that it would be, but I’m keeping these links in my back pocket (aka this blog post) in case things change.

What about the other photo hobbyists out there? How do you plan to share?

A couple of weeks ago, my wife sent me an email with a link to this PC-Mag article. ???FTC-Approved Company Will Save Dirt from Your Facebook Profile for 7 Years.

My first reaction was that isn’t all that surprising, and people really do need to learn to think before they post anything to a social networking site. Even if you’re only sharing it with a small group, in Google+ Circles for example, nothing is stopping someone from capturing that photo, post, etc. and sharing it elsewhere.

However, when I read the article, part of it really jumped out at me, in a disturbing way.

?Forbes got its hands on a few reports Social Intelligence has made for reporters. One job applicant was indicated to be a racist for joining a Facebook group called “I shouldn’t have to press 1 for English. We are in the United States. Learn the language.”

If that’s the sort of thing that gets you dropped from a potential job, wide-spread use of this service is going to lead to the majority of the country being unemployable. Good luck finding someone who passes this sort of examination hiring managers!

The other thing that this shows is the danger of large, widespread, data collection, especially by government entities. Anytime the subject comes up there’s always the chorus of “If you’re not doing anything wrong, what’s the big deal?” comments to anyone who thinks too much information is being collected. It’s not the data, it’s that someone is going to be interpreting the data completely out of context. Is the Facebook group mentioned above sort of just stupid? Sure. Does joining it make you racist? I think that’s a pretty big stretch, but someone at this company decided that it did, and now the background check run by potential employers is going to come up with you being a racist.

Extrapolate this example out, and you can see how it would be really easy to find information that would hurt you taken out of context. For example, tweeting in support of the US National Team in their recent soccer match with Mexico might be taken as racist, or maybe even anti-immigrant, when taken out of the context of a soccer match. (“C’mon boys beat those Mexicans” sounds somewhat normal during a game, not so much outside of that!). Talking about enjoying a drink after a stressful day might mean you’re a raging alcoholic, looking forward to the weekend might make you a disengaged employee, and on and on. It is all open to interpretation, and if someone can officially label you based on their interpretation, we have problems.

Still, be careful what you put out there. Some things are always stupid.

In the comments on that last post, Steven asks:

Mike, can you post instructions on how to post a pic to fb and restrict it so only 10 of my 100 friends can see it? ’cause I certainly haven’t figured that out yet.

Fair enough, I’ll show you how I did something similar, and then discuss some other options.

After going to my grandmother’s 90th birthday party, I wanted to share some photos of the event, and my family members, with just my family on Facebook.

First, I created a Friend list named Family. From the account menu, select the option to Edit Friends. Right at the top of that screen, there’s a button to “Create a List”.

I created a list named Family, and added my wife, my in-laws, my siblings  and their spouses, my cousins, etc. Once that was complete, I went over to the photos section, and created a new album for the birthday party. With the new album created, I clicked the link to “Edit Album”, which brings up a window where you can set the name, a description, the location and at the very bottom, who it is visible to. It will pick up your default setting from your privacy settings, in my case “Friends Only”, however it can be changed. The drop down will list other defaults, but also has a Customize option. In the new window that opens, again select the drop down next to Friends Only and select the Specific people option In the text box begin typing Family, until that shows up as an option. Select that, and the album is now only viewable to friends that I have added to that list.

That was my preference, because I had already started down the path of creating friend lists and trying to filter my newsfeed using those lists. (A feature that Facebook took out of the iPhone app, and has made much more hidden in the web version than it used to be, by the way!) However, you do not really even need to create lists if you don’t want to. Again, in the Custom sharing you could simply type the name of each friend you want to share the album with, and add them, or you can do the opposite and either create a list, or individuals, that you want to block from seeing it.

BTW, these same privacy settings are available for any status message, shared link, etc. Just click that little lock icon next to the Share button. The only place you do not have this option is on individual photos. The privacy is an album level setting only, as far as I can tell.

So, with some planning and a little digging around, you can get the same functionality within Facebook. I purposely haven’t mentioned Groups here either, because I don’t have any experience with using Groups and don’t know exactly how it works, but I imagine you could do something similar. The one big difference is that people will know they’ve been added to a group, they won’t know if you add them to a list.

Hope that helps!