Should you create your profile on multiple Social Network ?

New Social Network platform appears almost every week. Many of the new players are exploring niches or offer alternatives to the major players like FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn. Not to mention ClaimID or Naimz that are around for claiming your online identity.

Doppelganger.name published several interesting articles (in French) around online reputation and managing online identity.

The question covered in this article is Simple: Shall I setup a profile on multiple Social Network platforms?

Here is a scenario: You have your friends and professional from real life: IRL contacts (In Real Life). At some point you will create a profile by yourself to invite your friends or being invited from your friends. Here you go you know have a profile on 1 social network on FaceBook. Later you will have an opportunity to connect to a colleague. But he will invite you on LinkedIn. What shall you do? Refuse because the invite came from a different social network platform? Likely not. And here you go you have 2 profiles. Soon or later you will have an invite from MySpace then from Naimz then from Viadeo, then for … ok you’ve got the picture.

Having multiple profiles is not wrong. However you need to realise that a certain level of consistency should exist between the profiles.

The social network platforms bring you a value by maintaining a certain level of contact with your connections. This means investing a bit of time for maintaining the info from your profileS, and obviously some time spent on communication with your connections.

Here is where the bottleneck is: maintaining your profiles and the communication with your connections.

The more profile you have the more time you will need to maintain your profile. The more social network platform you use for communications the more time it will cost you.

How can you get around this?

My view is that you shall concentrate on maintaining your profile with details on 1 or 2 platforms. You might have more profile on other platforms but you shall only provide the bear minimum information into them and create a reference back to the profiles you are maintaining with details. This allows creating visibility in various platforms while maintaining a minimum of information.

Tell me what your view is on this?

Update on the Protected Page Problem

Sadly, LittleG’s Hidden Journey is still stopped because of Protected Page problem.

Since mid-April, I’ve been in contact with WordPress Support a couple of times via email and they have been helpful. WordPress acknowledged that they had an issue with the protected pages and they eventually told me that a fix on the server side should resolve it and would be put in a list of problem to fix.

The problem was that you had to wait for 10min in between each tentative of incorrect access to a protected page as soon as you entered the wrong password no matter if you were clearing you browser cache or not.

Lately I’ve been recontacted by the WordPress Support about my prob. The case was not gone dead and is still in the radar scope of “Nick” the WordPress Support contact.

Apparently something has been made on the server side but my problem is not yet entirely fixed.

So I’m back on my sandbox blog for more testing.

Step by step, I hope this will get fixed or to find a workaround and so I’ll be able to reopen the LittleG’s Hidden Journey.

Google Doodle : premier vol en mongolfière

My mood is to write in French today. But in a nutshell: Google is celebrating Hot Air Balloon with a specific logo. Back to French now.

Ce 4 juin, Google fait un clin d’oeil au premier vol en mongolfière par le biais d’un logo spécifique.

On aime ou on n’aime pas le graphique. Tous les goûts sont dans la nature.

Avec un peu d’imagination, je parie que Google pourrait nous servir un logo différent chaque jour… Allons, soyons plus réalistes, disons 1 logo différent par semaine. Qu’en pensez-vous ?

Vous aimer la chasse au Doodle ? Allez faire un tour sur le blog Zorgloob. Parmi les news relatives à Google, il parle bien entendu du logo de ce jour mais épingle également de manière régulière d’autres Doodles.

Classifying the data that build your online presence.

On Internet, many data exist that contribute to your Online Identity and your Online Reputation.

I believe that 4 types of data build your online presence.

1. The profile data that you provide on various platforms such as a user profile in a forum or your Facebook account, etc. These data will subsequently be partly available to everyone or to a limited number of people.
2. The contents that you publish as an author (like this blog), as a contributor into a publication (co-writing) or as a commenter on top of an existing content.
3. The indirect content that refers to your content (those from category 1). It is usually comments or contributions from others that refers to your writing and provide their view about your saying/writing.
4. The indirect profile information that your online friends write about you.

I intentionally discard all the data that are automatically generated and collected by external parties about your online activities (cookies, logging, etc). Why? Because by default they are not published to the crowd and so doesn’t fall under the 4 categories described above. As soon as they are published then they wouldfall under category 3 or 4. Michel Bénart, in the comments, proposed to group them as a fith category, the “grey data”, and I buy to his idea. The definition of it is:

…data collected during your online activity by third parties through cookies, beacons, and log connexions, to build your marketing profile…

What is your view on this data categorization ?

Doppelganger.name (French site) published a couple of articles that approach Online Identity and Online Reputation.

Here is how I woud map the 4 types 5 types of data. Online Identity is made of type 1. Online Reputation is made of type 3 and 4. I’m puzzled where to put type 2 and my god feel says Online Reputation. Type 5, being the grey data, are not strictly speaking visible Online Identity or visible Online Reputation.

Tell me what you think about this.

Weblin : a different Instant Messaging approach.

Some weeks ago, I first discovered Weblin browsing the blog Presse-Citron. It was located as a side widget.

Being curious I gave it a rapid try and played a few minutes with the Weblin lite version as offered in the blog.

What is Weblin? It is an instant messaging system that aims to connect you to other Weblin users currently viewing the same website as you. And rather then doing it in a typical chat window, it uses an overlaying animated avatar that stands at the bottom of your browser’s window.

The feeling was not negative, it was amusing but I was not trilled. That was enough for me at that point: I was a little more knowledgeable, I knew about Weblin better than before.

Recently Eric Dupin wrote an article about Weblin. Reading it raised my curiosity once again and I decided to give it a deeper try. This time I decided to install the client on my machine.

Weblinstaller.exe is a small installer that calls back the weblin server to download the latest version of the application.

Installation of Weblin is simple; it create a temporary account first, accessing that account only gives you access to a limited number of options in Weblin website to customize your avatar. Later you can identify yourself with an account of your choice and access to more futile feature like choosing your avatars from a wider list.

Basic usage of Weblin is intuitive. Yet again a new icon in my systray, yet again a new service running on my machine. With Weblin enabled, just go on your favourite website and see other weblins and engage conversation.

Your avatar and those for other users will show t the bottom of your browser window. You can also define to be visible or not, automatically connect to the “chat room” when you enter a website or not, etc.

I must say I haven’t explored all the features of Weblin: changing room, an interesting yet-to-explore applications’ menu, weblin publishing and others.

On the weblin account page itself, there is plenty of options. Not my idea to detail them all. But I captured the classical describe-yourself-and-display-it-to-others, a rather complete avatar customization interface.

There is also a section about “Buying Gifts” associated with a virtual backpack for the Avatar. Credits to purchase items seem to be linked to your chat activities. The more you chat the more credits you get.

Your weblin account can retain 3 different Avatars but you can only activate one at a time. The activation impacts all your opened browser pages. It is not possible to have Avatar “A” active on a specific set of sites and Avatar B active on a different set of sites.

You need to test Weblin to know if you like it or not and certainly if you want to use this kind of communication channel to fulfil your daily desire of chatting with other people.

My own view is on this: Not for me.

Will it works for you ?

Little note: It took quite a while to complete this article: Good weather and related outdoor activities definitely slow down my posting frequency.