Geeks Are Sexy: Facebook Etiquette Manifesto

Geeks Are Sexy: Facebook Etiquette Manifesto

Creator: Geeks are Sexy is a group with the mission to: “Provide up to the minute tech news, reviews and tutorials to our readership, which is mainly composed of IT professionals and computer enthusiasts.

Purpose: Facebook has become mainstream and covers a diverse audience too wide for the “normal evolutionary process for polite online behaviour.”

Facebook Etiquette Manifesto

1) When you reply to an event invitation, you have three options: Yes, No and Maybe. Take note of the last one and use it properly. If you say Yes, you are committing to coming to the event in exactly the same way as if you’d agreed in person. Of course you aren’t forced to turn up, but it’s the level of commitment at which you should be sending a text or e-mail if you have to cancel. If you aren’t sure you’ll be able to make it — or if you’re just too polite to say no or ignore the invite — then use the Maybe option.

2) If you make a friend request to somebody you don’t know in person, include a line explaining who you are. Don’t just randomly attempt to add people without explanation, and remember that if you know somebody only through online activity elsewhere, they may not recognize your real name.

3) Don’t tag people in potentially embarrassing photographs without asking them first. You might not see anything wrong with that snapshot from the tequila bar, but if your friend has just applied for a job as a teacher or lawyer, there’s a good chance the potential employer will see the pic before your friend can frantically untag it.

4) Keep an eye on your own profile and wall to see what’s getting posted there automatically by applications you’ve signed up to. Disable any automatic posts that either appear several times a day or have no genuinely useful information for anyone. If you still need to use a particularly post-heavy application, you may be able to tweak it to control exactly what it posts by editing the settings at http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=applications.

5) Before cutting and pasting a status update, check whether it’s true and whether it’s helpful. 93% of people won’t even bother to find out if statistics they quote are legitimate. Will you be in the 7% who do?

6) Assume that anything you post on somebody’s wall will be seen by every single person they know in the world. Don’t rely on them having set their privacy settings properly: even if they have, Facebook’s probably reset the defaults without telling them three times today already.

7) If you’ve got something to say to one person and it doesn’t need to be seen to anyone else, send them a message rather than posting it on their wall. Even if you don’t unintentionally embarrass them or create an awkward situation, posting personal messages on walls just clogs up other people’s news feeds.

8) Above all else, never ever post a status update that involves a countdown using the unit of “sleeps.”

 

Source

Posted on GeeksAreSexy.net

Dmitri Shapiro: The Anti-Facebook Manifesto

The Anti-Facebook or Alty Manifesto

Creator: Dmitry Shapiro, the founder of Veoh and former CTo of MySpace Music has just received startup funding for Altly, an alternative to Facebook.

Purpose: To overcome feeling pressured to ‘friend’ someone on Facebook, Altly will be an alternative social network to Facebook. At it’s core is a different set of beliefs around privacy and the use of our personal information.

The Altly Manifesto

Altly (name may change before we launch) is building a Facebook alternative.  Think of it as a social network for Facebook graduates!

We believe :

• Privacy is ULTIMATELY important.

• We should know EXACTLY who can see what information about us.

• Control of our information should be in OUR hands, and it should be EXTREMELY easy for us to control it.

• WE should choose what information is stored, how long it is kept, and who it is available to.

• Our digital life, our personal information is EXTREMELY valuable, and each of us should not only control who has access to it, but BENEFIT from it.

• Advertisers should be part of our community, but should NOT have an unfair advantage over us.

• All of our data should be OURS, and no one else’s.  If we choose to leave our social network, we should be able to easily take ALL of our data with us, and COMPLETELY delete all data if we choose.

• If other social networks should be developed, they should be able to interoperate with one another.

Source

Author’s complete Blog Article: http://blog.altly.com/2011/05/the-need-for-an-alternative-to-facebook/

Article about Alty Funding: http://www.socaltech.com/altly_posts_anti_facebook_manifesto_gets_funding/s-0035969.html