The Many Faces of You and How To Keep Control of Those Faces - NYTimes.com

It’s a little odd to see your own photo in the “people you may know” box, but I have two Facebook profiles, for work (Claire Cain Miller), and for my personal life (Claire Miller Cain). Having two accounts allows my friends to see my wedding pictures but not the pitches I get from publicists, and my boss to see links to articles I find interesting but not the photos my friend posted after our vacation in Mexico. That need to put up a digital wall between work and life is an obvious reason that Facebook recently introduced an easier way to make posts and photos visible only to certain groups. Concern about privacy was one of Facebook’s motivations, but it was also reflecting the way we live our lives offline.

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Is there a national cultural identity in a Facebook world?

An interesting article originally titled "Is there an Australian culture in a Facebook world?" published to-day in the Sydney Morning Herald could even more appropriately be entitled "Is there a national culture identity in a Facebook world?" Simon Letch Illustration: Simon Letch CULTURE and creativity are central to life in the 21st century. The global stakes have never been higher; never before have we been surrounded by so much information or so much art - high and popular, visual and aural, original and reproduced, amusing and challenging, bland and exciting. In cities the world over, tribes are instantly recognisable irrespective of country of origin, defined by the beautifully designed objects of consumer capitalism they wear and carry, the entertainment they download, the food and drinks they consume, the news they absorb. Spotting anything uniquely Australian in this wash of global brands is harder than recognising the distinctively laidback style of Australians abroad.

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90+ Essential Social Media Resources, the Best List of Social Media Tools Yet!! - Mashable

Now you’ve gone and done it. You’ve come across a list so enormous, so useful, and so awesome, our futile attempts to describe it have been lost in the tubes of cyberspace. We’ll just say this: No matter what you’re into — Twitter (Twitter), Facebook (Facebook), Mobile Apps, Business Development, or good-old-fashioned YouTube (YouTube) hilarity — you will find it below. So put down your barbeque, send out another huge thanks to our men and women in uniform, and limber up your scrolling finger — it’s a big one. If you dig the uber-list, be sure to send some comments our way down below!

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Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time To Reclaim Our Privacy | Epicenter | Wired.com

Are we beginning to see the emergence of a social and critical movement attacking the hegemony of social media, allowing us to take back our identities, return privacy into our own hands in the process returning real meaning to the word " friend" . Maybe not, but his article from Wired is thought provoking. Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed. Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. Even if you didn’t really want to keep up with them. Soon everybody

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Why Syncing Contacts in Social Media is such an Impossible Dream - Harvard Business Review

Of all the problems that plague the plugged-in, social worker, one of the simplest remains the hardest to solve: Syncing contacts. Most of us have so many contacts spread across so many networks we lose track of them, can't access them when and where we need to and miss opportunities to connect. All we want is to synchronize all of our contact lists. A master rolodex. Why is that so hard? Google offered to connect me with Joseph Smarr, the former CTO of Plaxo, a company that's been trying to create this for the past 8 years now; Smarr is now with Google on a team focused on the social Web. I asked Smarr to help me understand the limitations of contact syncing today, why something so simple is actually complex, and when we can expect it to get easier.

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