Hello all! After a long intermission, it’s back to blogging for me. But now just for fun and as things strike me, rather than for the benefit of my undergraduate thesis.
As I work to wrap up my thesis and prepare for my oral defense this weekend, I’m realizing that this is the beginning on the end. When I started at ASU, completing an undergraduate thesis seemed so daunting and far off. Yesterday I attended the last ASU home basketball game that I’ll ever attend as a student. I know there are many more “lasts” to come between now and May… but also many “firsts” in the near future.
Since I started this blog, I’ve learned a lot about social media and been forced to dive in head first. As I explored Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, and the tons of other social media outlets, I started to wonder about the efficiency of it all. How can any one person keep up with all the various sites and outlets? And do you even need to? Isn’t Twitter just one big feed of Facebook status updates? So I was pleased to read this article today (found via Ad Age’s tweet) about Facebook changing to enable a faster, more Twitter-like exchange of information.
One of the significant changes is that brands will be able to have profiles more like a personal user’s profile. Brand updates and content posts will appear in the feed just like your friends’ updates. While I understand the value of this from an aspiring marketing professional’s perspective, I couldn’t help but think – ugh! Does this mean more advertising junk on Facebook? I use Facebook for friendships, unlike Twitter where I follow many brands and news media I was hoping to keep the separation.
Thankfully, as I read on, the answer is no. Well, not if you don’t want it to be that way. Along with these changes comes a new batch of filters that will allow you to remove updates from brands (or not-so-much friends) who are annoying you. These changes seem to be ideal to me, because it may combine the features of Facebook and Twitter (so I don’t have to constantly check both) but gives you the ability to control what you see.
I’m still waiting for Twitter to provide you with the ability to keep certain people’s tweets on your home page for longer, and other people’s tweets come up less frequently. I always end up missing @THE_REAL_SHAQ’s hilarious tweets because @BreakingNewsOn fills my homepage.
