facebook: a love/hate relationship

It's true. I'm experiencing a Facebook dilemma. Lame that it's even possible in our society. This place where real relationships can exist solely over messages, wall posts and status updates. Gah!

I almost died along with the rest of the young people out there when Mark Zuckerberg and his team added the creepy updates about what your friends were doing at any given moment. And now, I'm even more addicted to f-book than I was before. The problem however, is that after this conference people have been adding me left and right and I don't know what to do.

Being the twenty something I am, I enjoy posting most of my photos (which may occasionally include a few beer bottles/glasses of wine and crazy good times) there so my friends can snag them and even had my blog linked, until yesterday. I had previously set "limited profiles" for some people (colleagues), but then realized few people had done the same to me. Therefore my profile looks like I'm a female, interested in males, who is liberal and has a job. Wow, Miss Personality. So, I "unlimited profiled" them and now have a personality, however unprofessional that may be.

I must say, it's a real dilemma. Working in the sector I do, things aren't super formal and my feeling is that I really don't post much on f-book that I wouldn't tell someone if they asked. Hm... But as for the blog, it just felt too personal to be sitting out there in la la land for colleagues to read. I had to delete the link.

Tell me, what's your take on the whole facebook profile? Keep it professional? Fun & Realistic? Keep colleagues on limited profile access with no ability to see photos? At some point I may want to go into something more corporate, but is a casual facebook profile really going to hamper those opportunities? I don't know.

Comments

Laura said…
I have some fun stuff on mine, but nothing totally over the top. When I was applying for jobs though, I pulled my profile down from Facebook completely until I signed an offer. Even if you put it on limited so only your friends can see it, at my company, they actually have the junior analysts log onto Facebook so they can try to see the profiles of the college students who might have them blocked from non-alumni/non-friends/etc.
KGreg said…
Yeah, I took down my blog link once several colleagues started adding me. I don't worry so much about the pictures because I omit the embarrassing ones anyway, and honestly I found the limited profile settings to be a lot of work for a little privacy. I agree that once I'm on the job hunt again, I'll probably scale back considerably, but for now I'm trying not to worry about it.
Laura said…
Also wanted to add - I don't share my blog with almost anyone I know in real life. It lets me be a little bit more uncensored instead of worrying what friends/family/coworkers think :)
Anonymous said…
I always wonder whether I should/shouldn't have pictures, blog link, etc on facebook. one of my supervisors from my on-campus job at school "friended" me and I was like uhhh this is awkward. ha, he's not one to care about stuff like that, but it was weird. I totally hear ya
P.O.M. said…
Hmmm. I hear ya. I only have old friends and current friends on face book. But some of them I would NOT want to read my blog. So I don't link the two - at all. I definately don't want my work people to have access to either. Limited is good. I don't care if they think I have no personality :)

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