I’ve had some interesting follow up conversations regarding the issues covered in my last post. I spent some time checking in with some of my executive recruiter friends. I wanted to verify whether the professional recruiters I knew actually used Facebook and/or My Space to check references for (or find) potential candidates. Interestingly enough, while everyone I spoke to said that they knew about the sites and thought they might check them in the future, no one actually used them yet.
One executive recruiter thought that her candidates were not in the right “age demographic” to have a My Space page. I’m not so sure that is a realistic generalization. While my daughter may think I’m too old to have a Facebook account, after I created the account, I actually got a “friend” request from a colleague who, while younger than me, is much older than my daughter! I also got a “friend” request from someone whom I did not know and is definitely older than me. My daughter thought that the request was “creepy” and demonstrated exactly why her mother should not have a Facebook account. (I accepted the first and declined the latter.)
My friend Drew sent me the following link: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20183/?nlid=866 to a February 11 article in the MIT Technology Review. The article is a review of a social networking site called Moli that addresses some of the exact privacy issues that I raised in my post. Moli is designed to allow users to have multiple profiles with different privacy settings in one account. The person who replied to my last blog posting indicates that Facebook is planning to offer the same type of service. I’m not sure the world needs yet another social networking site but I do believe that being able to manage multiple personas in one location is critical.
Finally, I wanted to add a post-script to the conversation with my daughter. She has now informed me that I have even found a way to embarrass her over the internet (and not just in person!) and that there is nothing more dangerous than having a mother armed with two critical tools of the internet age – a Facebook account and a blog!
Hanley is an independent consultant and president of her own firm, Susan Hanley LLC, where she specializes in the design and development of portal solutions and knowledge management consulting.
She is co-author of Essential SharePoint 2007: Delivering High-Impact Collaboration. Read a free chapter of the book.
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This is one of the things I
This is one of the things I like about LiveJournal it has the most advanced filtering and security features I've found on the social networks. It makes me feel much safer that I can lock information down to filtered friends lists and keep unwanted eyes off my personal posts, etc.