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Archive | January, 2012

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Porn on Twitter

Porn on Twitter - The Anti-Social Media

Twitter made a big stink last year by creating their own photo service.

Here’s something you probably didn’t notice though (unless you’re a dirty pervert), Twitter allows people to post porn.

Finally, you can share all your nasty, 140 character fantasies with all of your followers. Want to show your crappy cell phone pic of wang all over town? Twitter’s got you covered. Want the world to see your ta-tas? Tweet them out.

This is different from other image services, which had policies in place so we didn’t have to see your nasty junk.  They would take down your photos because they knew no one wanted to see that. Twitter, on the other hand, only has policies about child pornography.

Everything else is a fair, naked game.

Twitter can’t monitor every body part that gets posted on there. Porn stars have been tweeting their private parts for years now. And now the unwashed masses can join them in the orgy of fleshy images.

No longer do we need to worry if we can share our junk next to our resume and a link to a cute cat. We can. But the burden is entirely on us to behave like rational human beings. Isn’t that terrifying?

Just because you can keep your porn on Twitter, you probably shouldn’t. People look at that stuff, and we don’t need to know how kinky you really are. Really, we don’t.

Don’t the trending topics provide enough horror?

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Trending Topics on Twitter

Twitter Trends - The Anti-Social MediaI recently started paying more attention to the trending topics section on Twitter. Somehow, I forgot how awful the trending topics are.

Trending topics have all the benefits of giving yourself a lobotomy. However, they come without the high price or inherent danger of performing a clumsy self-surgery on your brain. They somehow manage to combine the absolute worst in ideas, writing, and respect for other human beings in less than 140 characters.

It takes serious effort to be that consistently bad.

Let’s take a trend from last week and use it as an example: #iusetothink

This trend would be fine if people used it correctly. We would see a bunch of people saying “A good workout #iusetothink” or “A walk with the dog #iusetothink.” But no, that would be too obvious and would assume that people understood basic tense agreement.

Instead, we have a bunch of people saying things that they USED to think. This trend has caught on so much that even brands, whose community managers should know better, used the hashtag in a desperate attempt to stay out of touch and in front of an audience. It makes brands look dumb.

Marketers - based on this example, we can assume that the audience for promoted trends doesn’t even understand the basics of grammar. Do you honestly believe that the people who share trending topics will grasp your weird promoted trend and be able to help you accomplish your business goals?

This is why Twitter’s trending topics fail so miserably. Putting some funky hashtagged term in the face of hundreds of millions of Twitter users does not mean an instant success. You can’t target if you’re getting the brightest people, or those who need to go back to grammar school. And both of those groups will find a way to twist your message around in ways you never expected.

So avoid giving yourself the stress and brain damage and just avoid trending topics. Your brain cells will thank me later.

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Nobody Will Hangout With Me On Google+

Google Plus Hangouts - The Anti-Social MediaI’m a loser. A total, epic, mega loser.

I’ve been on Google+ since it launched in June, and only one person has hung out with me. And that was for work.

Hangouts are supposed to be fun and friendly. They’re supposed to bring your intimate circles together. They’re supposed to be impromptu and spontaneous.

Instead, they just make me jealous.

Why do other people get to hang out with The Muppets, President Obama, and William Shatner? Why am I stuck alone in my apartment with my cat? She doesn’t want to hang out on Google+. She just wants to sleep and eat cat food and hang out on my lap in real life.

And where’s the fun in that?

So let’s hang out. Join me for a Google+ Hangout on Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 9 pm EST on The Anti-Social Media. We can all be losers and talk about cats and coffee and how much we all hate Facebook and Google+. Afterwards, we can all blog about how much we hate hangouts.

But for a few minutes, we’ll be the coolest kids on the internet.

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Don’t Spam Your LinkedIn Connections

Party On LinkedIn - The Anti-Social MediaI’m pretty open to connecting with people on LinkedIn because connecting on LinkedIn is the best way to stalk someone. In fact, I typically will connect with anyone who requests to connect with me, so long as they don’t seem like a complete sociopath.

But people have begun to abuse my willingness to connect.

These people who I’ve been connected with for months and years have suddenly decided that it’s OK to use LinkedIn to send me weird pitches. Instead of using it to cultivate a relationship, they just decide to  send me a demo of weird tool I’ll never use. I also get messages that assume I know everything about my connection’s lives, because I’m stalking every single moment of their existence.

Seriously people. Stop abusing your power.

You already have all the information you need to contact me appropriately. LinkedIn is the best tool for stalking people because they tell you everything you need to know about contacting them professionally.

Just because we’re connected on LinkedIn doesn’t mean we’re bosom buddies. I know, I shared a link you posted, but that was really just coincidence, not affinity. Stop reading so deeply into the relationship you’ve imagined between us.

Use LinkedIn to build relationships, not stomp all over them like Godzilla. Slow, careful development of a relationship will yield better results.

Besides, no one was going to read your half-assed pitch regardless of where you sent it.

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Community Manager Appreciation Day

Thanks I think - The Anti-Social MediaToday is Community Manager Appreciation Day.

Yes, it’s time for another weird social media “holiday.”

Seriously, who knows or  cares about this so-called holiday besides community managers? Most people don’t even know that community managers exist in their online lives. They think that crap just automatically comes out on Facebook and Twitter from brands. Given the sheer number of comments and madness on some Facebook walls, you’d be hard pressed to think they was any actual moderation there.

But community managers deserve a holiday. Hell, they deserve a whole week to be celebrated. Community managers are a special brand of psychopath who make our online experiences much better. They kill the trolls. They remove the spam. They humanize the faceless avatars.

They do all the thankless work of making the internet remotely more usable. And they do so willingly and passionately, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, including holidays.

This is why they’re such lovable psychopaths.

So, even though the “holiday” is contrived, say thanks to the poor person who has to read all 10,000 comments on a Facebook page. They deal with just as much craziness in their job as you do in yours.

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SOPA and PIPA Blackouts

Political Criticism - The Anti-Social MediaThere are a lot of websites going dark today to protest SOPA an PIPA.

Those websites are stupid.

Let me be clear. SOPA and PIPA are awful.I’m totally for educating yourself about national, state and local politics and acting on them. I’m also for using your platform to share messages that are important to you.

But blacking out your website with links for people to send form letters, tweet, and write on their Facebook wall for their elected officials is just silly. What exactly are you going to say on a Facebook post that would be so moving to change a senator’s mind. Do you even know if they read their Facebook wall?

Turning off your website, no matter how many hits you get daily, is just a very minor inconvenience. Seriously, most of us don’t need the internet to live.

Your senator doesn’t care that you could click a button to send an email. Your representative has better things to do than pay attention to the fact you change your Facebook photo and Twitter avatar. Those acts are next to worthless.

Call me a dirty capitalist, but I think money is much more influential than whiny electronic communications.

This website helps me pay my bills, and I pay taxes on what I earn. Those taxes in turn pay my officials’  salaries and for a lot of other nice things I get to enjoy as an American. My officials are much more interested in how a small online business owner such as myself, would be negatively impacted and thus impact their revenue stream.

That’s the kind of compelling story of how people are negatively impacted by this legislation that can change minds and votes. Less money to pay for things is bad. Less LOLCats is a tragedy, but one we can all suffer through.

The only person who will be reading your crappy form letter is the poor intern who had a hope and dream they’d be making a difference in the world. Don’t crush that dream with lame tweets.

But if you still want to do something, send a real letter.  One that you have to put in the mail. Sign your name to it. Make a phone call. Take the time to do something real and meaningful.

Because  at this point we know they’ll probably just shut off the internet anyways.

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Fags and Retards

Name Calling Is For Losers - The Anti-Social MediaI play a lot of video games. I like to distract myself from the pain and suffering of the real world with the colorful world of electronic diversion. Unfortunately, I can’t even escape stupidity and madness in virtual fantasy worlds.

Let me explain:

I play World of Warcraft.

Go ahead, judge me now. I can wait.

Alright, are we ready to move on?

In the World of Warcraft, you join other groups of random players to run dungeons. Typically, these are nice people who just want to get a particular in-game item from the dungeon. These people recognize it’s a game and sometimes you win or lose, but that you try again and that it’s all for fun.

Other times, you get one or two very angry people who feel super powered because they have a hint of anonymity. When things don’t go their way, they start blaming everything on the other players and call them names. In particular though, they call people these two names:

Fags and Retards.

They lost a meaningless game, and because they were so upset about it, they start throwing around nasty, hurtful language.

What’s even worse about this? Most people do nothing about it.

They don’t call them out. They don’t ask them to stop. They don’t tell them they are a pathetic homophobe hiding behind a veil of anonymity.

They just stand there and take it.

This behavior isn’t limited to games. A quick public search for “fags” on Twitter shows just how many people think it’s ok. Same thing for “retards.”

These are the people we live and work with. We walk past them on the street, in the grocery store, and in our schools. We let them bully other people because we won’t speak up and tell them it’s wrong.

Words hurt people. Labels hurt people. Reading them on a computer screen doesn’t make them hurt any less.

Think about the words you use online. Think about how they might hurt someone. And don’t allow other people to get away with it.

Yes, it’s awkward. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. But can you really be happy allowing other people to get hurt because you were too cowardly to speak up?

I know I can’t live in a world, online or off, where I allow other people to get hurt because I didn’t have the guts to tell them to knock it off.

Stop being afraid of these people.

The worst thing they’re going to do is call you a name in a tweet.

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How People Interpret Facebook’s Life Events

This is how some people see Life Events on Facebook:

Facebook Life Events - Marriage - The Anti-Social Media

This is how other people see life events on Facebook:

Facebook Life Events - Bathroom - The Anti-Social Media

This is how I see life events on Facebook:

Facebook Life Events - Cat - The Anti-Social Media

Life events - just another way for people to ruin their personal brands.