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So if you know anything about my “professional” life, you know that this blog has been quiet so that I can focus on my primary goal– achieving admission into a PhD program in Cognitive Psychology. As I prepare for the considerable life changes that will accompany the segue from undergraduate to graduate study, any casual reader of this blog might wonder: what sort of social media transition process might there be as one makes a significant next step?
As I see it, a successful social media transition requires three steps: 1) determine goals, 2) simplify services, and 3) manage branding and privacy.
For a successful shift, one should first consider their current social media strategy. Mine, for instance, is centered primarily around this blog, with an additional effort to have an account on every other service that strikes me as remotely meaningful. As a college undergraduate, this is a viable plan of action, but moving on to a position in graduate school, much like taking on a new job, requires a heightened sense of professionalism. As my public role becomes one of scholarship and research, my primary web stronghold needs to reflect this fact.
Once a general plan of action has been formed, it’s time to eliminate any distractions within the system. As a student, for instance, there’s much less reason to focus on FriendFeed– since carefully monitoring popular web media is no longer of interest, this sort of service could comfortably fall by the wayside. A transition provides the perfect opportunity to separate the social media wheat from the chaff.
A natural extension of the prior principles is the importance of carefully managing the Internet face you share with the world. If someone’s looking for a graduate researcher, for instance, and they find this website, they might be confused as to what my primary occupation truly is. Likewise, a transition provides an excellent opportunity to double-check or sanitize all handles, usernames, and other such pointers so that they are consolidated into appropriate categories.
Do you have any particular experiences regarding managing your social media services as you transition from one phase of life to another? Please share them!
It’s only appropriate, too, that I announce now that this site will soon be moving to another, to-be-announced domain. Stay tuned for more details!
Brand new in my inbox:
You signed up for an early BETA of Kakuteru. You’re one of the lucky few to give this service it’s first spin! Kakuteru is a fully customizable lifestreamer that tries to ride the waves of the ever interconnected and semantic web. Right now it uses FriendFeed as an aggregation backend, but it also provides custom integrations like for example Dopplr for your travel schedule.
For those that haven’t received an invitation to the invite-only service quite yet, I thought I would share some first impressions about this “customizable lifestreamer.”
The setup process for Kakuteru was quite simple: enter in your name, a desired subdomain on the Kakuteru server, and your FriendFeed account. Bang: a brand new Kakuteru.
Immediately upon setup, Kakuteru showed support for the following services:
And there would probably be more, too, I gather, if I imported more into my FriendFeed account.
Additionally, some other services are supported on an “Extra Integration” page: custom DISQUS settings (although DISQUS is already supported by default), Feedburner, Dopplr, and AddThis.
Once you’ve got your new lifestream up and running, the view is pretty plain at this point. You’ll have to view mine to get a complete picture of what I’m talking about here, but think someone’s Twitter page with extra links and tags at the right.
One neat little feature is the “trends” page which displays my activity over time in a variety of interesting ways. One such view is the “activity by hour” view, as shown on the left. It’s easy to see I’m busiest between 2:00 and 3:00pm, but I wonder if a service updates at that time (as seems to be the reason for spikes at 11pm and 7pm, etc.
My overall impression with Kakuteru is that developer Dominiek has laid down an excellent framework for the next big lifestreaming service. The way it piggybacks on FriendFeed makes for a very interesting design and development choice, and I’m looking forward to seeing where the service goes– and playing around with it considerably– in the upcoming weeks.
