Tralfaz

Category: Social Media

  • My problems with LinkedIn

    linkedin-logoI am getting social media swamped.  But there is one trend that I am sure that I am not alone in is the in your face nature that LinkedIn has become since going public.  I have been a member of Linkedin for a long time, and it has been a good place to collect my professional connections.  But, it is not a place that I go to daily, weekly, or even once a month.  The truth is that for me it is not a major motivator in my professional career. But lately, the noise from LinkedIn has become intolerable.  I blame the pressures of becoming a public company and the incessant drive to derive money from its users. But, come on…

    First, as a user, and in my past searches for new positions, I have never once thought to look to LinkedIn.  I know that there are job postings there, and that some people are successful in using it to hunt for jobs, but, truth be told I rely on my reputation, and the relationships I have with a few select recruiters who I have worked with in the past (on both sides, as a candidate and to seek a candidate). LinkedIn has disrupted this, but, to me, not for the better.  I get a lot of queries for positions that it should be clear to a 3rd grade level reader that I am not really suitable for, or that my qualifications don’t fit. It is almost like it has made recruiters stupid, and turned them into spamming telemarketers.  I have stopped responding to the most ludicrous ones.

    Second, what started as a nice idea, the “recommendations” feature has become rife with abuse.  How often do you get a query from a past colleague seeking recommendations?  You can decline, but most people just cave in and write one. Usually glowing with flowery praise for someone who is about as intelligent and worthy as a potted plant. When I do go hunting around, I often read the recommendations for former colleagues that I didn’t write, and I have seen a lot of lipstick applied to the proverbial pig. Yikes.  I would never rely on the recommendations of a candidate that are on linked in.  For the record. I have NEVER asked for a recommendation.  The ones on my profile are genuine from people who wouldn’t pull punches.

    Lastly, they have started this thing called “endorsements”.  You see 4 of your connections with what seems like a match for their skills, and are asked to endorse them.  I have received literally hundreds of them. The problem is that most of the people doing the endorsement wouldn’t know how good I am at “Product Management” or “Marketing”.  My interactions with them were either for different reasons, or completely unrelated to what they have endorsed me for. Criminy, I got endorsed for “Microsoft Office”. Seriously, WTF is up with that?

    Naturally, this is all to help them generate more page views, and more advertising, thus leading HR and Recruiters to continue to pony up for the access to this huge pool of talent. But to me, LinkedIn remains a fairly static view of me and my career. Regardless of how often they offer me a free month of “Premium” I will never take it, because to me there can’t be enough value for me to pay for it. Monetizing your “product” is important, but just like if Facebook started charging the users for the service, it would whither and die, so will LinkedIn.  Continue to make it the professional network, but realize that some/many of your enhancements are making the service far less valuable for my time. There is nothing LinkedIn can do to get my visit frequency to daily.

    (I originally wrote this for my professional blog, but thought I should share it here as well)

  • Dear Google, please stop fscking with Gmail

    Two days ago, I gave you props for being smart about the “Reply All” function in Gmail. Today, you wiped out that karma credit you earned with your new changes to gmail.

    Once again Google screws their userbase
    Once again Google screws their userbase

    I have long been a happy, satisfied customer of gmail. Hell, I purchase a small business account for my main domain, because your service is pretty kick ass. I have been on gmail since it was invitation only back in 2003 (I think). Mostly, I access through the web, as I have found the interface to be clean, intuitive, and efficient.

    I understand that your product teams like to have things to work on. Heck, I am in product management, so I know the ship or die mentality.

    You may have done some customer validation, and market research. Heck, you probably have enough back end analytics to get a very granular idea of how people use and interact with Gmail. So, after crunching that data, you put together a feature map, and started coding.

    But, I have become quite satisfied with my email workflow, and even something as innocuous as the tabs to organize email is disruptive to my work. This will drive me to move to using a MUA to process my mail (Apple Mail or Outlook) and to bypass the once excellent, spartan, and usable gmail interface.

    No, I will not give up my gmail address for this, but I would be a lot happier if you gave people the option to stay with what they had. You are getting as bad as Facebook in changing the look and feel of Gmail.

  • Touching a nerve

    So, I have a regular blog where I talk about product management and other career-like things.  I get 20 or so visits a day, and I have some followers in the product management / product marketing world. I try to be a little bit of a balance against all the happy-feel-good self promoting blogs from the Product Management conslutants.

    Some things I have noticed:

    • The greater the “snark” factor, the more visits. When I write something that is non-controversial, or informative on the role, I get far less of a response than I do when I go on a rant.
    • The oddest topics seem to resonate.
    • Some people just need to take a chill pill and relax.

    Case in point. The second most viewed post was when I was ranting about LinkedIn. They are doing a lot of scummy things to try to bolster their database, and to make money. Can’t blame them, but it does get tiring (I should do a follow up, because it seems like every week, I get an entreaty from them to try the “Premium” service.) If you want to check it out, it is at this link.

     

  • Oops, I did it again – The Facebook game

    Lately I have seen people in my friends list tell me to change some setting to prevent their life events leaking into the facebook social graph. Sigh.

    It seems like every few months, there is some new way that Facebook abuses your personal information, making it harder for you to control who sees what that you post.

    First, for those who expect me to change some setting to help you, or you are going to have to unfriend me, you better just unfriend me now, because I am not going to continually mess with settings in facebook.

    Next, if you post anything to Facebook that you don’t want used to target you for ads, spam your inbox, or to determine how you behave to improve targeting, then you are an idiot. Facebook has consistently shit on your efforts to contain the information you share via Facebook. They are always ignoring their own settings for privacy, and who sees what. That isn’t ever going to change. Now that they are public, Facebook is trying to monetize their service. But the only real value that they offer is what you share, and what they can glean from that.

    So, if you don’t want your “life events” (whatever the f*ck they are) spreading to the social graph, DON’T post them. But don’t expect your connections and friends to alter their settings to suit your paranoia. In fact, I have an even better piece of advice. Close and delete your facebook account (you can do it here). Because if you can’t grasp the concept of not sharing anything you aren’t happy for the whole friggin’ world to see, then you have no business messing around with Social Media (of any sort).

    For the record.  I don’t post anything super personal, and make a point of being as sarcastic of an asshole as I can be. And I am not going to jump through hoops to help you in your quest to control what you share with Facebook.

    Had to get that off my chest.

  • Has social media destroyed public discourse?

    I came of age at a fortuitous time. In high school, the Apple ][ computers arrived and were in a lab that you could take a course. I learned a lot about microcomputers there, and soon saved my paper route money to buy my own (not an Apple, way too expensive, I went the Atari route – better games). I learned a lot about that system, I learned to program in basic, and rudimentary assembly language, I learned a lot of the concepts about computing that serve me well today.

    Public Discourse appears to be dying in the social media age
    Public Discourse appears to be dying in the social media age

    After a couple of years, I got immersed into the BBS community. With the simple addition of a modem, a piece of hardware that connected you via telephone to other computers, you could share files, and trade stories. I enjoyed participating so much that I soon took the plunge and began running a BBS of my own. I made a lot of friends, “chatted” with people from across the country, and even a few international ones.

    Part of the charm of the BBS culture were the message forums. These often led to animated discussions back and forth between users (and myself of course). I graduated from that to USENET, UUCP, and the various discussion venues. For a long time I hung out at rec.motorcycles.dirt where off road motorcyclists hung out, and planned excursions.

    From there came the special interest forums. Truly a child of the internet age, there is a plethora of topics and communities that have evolved. From auto detailing, to dedicated forums for specific video games, to Japanese Anime collectors, there are sure to be something that strikes your fancy.

    Then came Twitter. Suddenly conversations were limited to 140 characters (the size of an SMS text message). Instead of commenting on a blog post that you agree with, or dispute, it is now the norm to just “tweet” it, and leave the discussion in the Twitter universe, hopelessly buried in the noise. Blog posts that 3 or 4 years ago would have elicited a dozen or more responses, now have no activity.

    I believe that this is a shame. The value of the intercourse of ideas, a foundation of intellectual pursuit, has been reduced to the re-tweet.

    I for one make a point of commenting often when I come across a topic that piques my curiosity. But it appears that the ephemeral vehicle that is the 140 character tweet is destroying the practice of public discourse.

  • If I hear this one more time I am going to lose it.

    Those following the thread have seen my comments about a web project going poorly.

    End root cause is that we went with a vendor which we were “comfortable” with, and didn’t figure out up front if he had the chops to deliver.

    I want to pull back, complete a formal proposal (I had started this then I was told that the project was already 1/2 done), pick 3-4 local Web shops (I am in Phoenix, so there are lots here) to bid on it and then pick someone who has the chops and the skills to succeed at a price we can afford.

    The answer to that was astonishing. 

    We don’t want to do that. Getting a new vendor into our system is a painful process, and will take far longer than the whole project.

    So, instead of using the right vendor, even if that requires getting them into our ERP system, we choose to use underqualified hacks, because it is too hard to find new? 

    Really?