this is not a picture related to boobs

What follows is my method of deciding who to friend on the three major social networks: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Your method may differ; I get that. It’ll come off a bit pompous; I get that too.

Facebook

Facebook for me is personal. I friend people on Facebook using the following criteria (at least one of these must be true):

1. You are a close friend
2. You are someone I’ve met a number of times (associate) who I would enjoy having numerous, long conversations with (hint: concepts vs. current events)
3. You are someone I know of and have interacted with only a little, but you’re someone I’d enjoy having numerous, long conversations with

Who’s Not On This List

• High school friends who I have nothing in common with
• Celebrities of any sort who I have nothing in common with
• People I know well but who don’t have anything in common with me (see long conversations)
• Anyone who I wouldn’t trust to have a key to my house

Basically, the criteria is trustworthy people, who share interests with me, who I can enjoy long conversations with about things I find interesting. This matters because this is where I post personal stuff, like thinking of changing jobs, thinking of moving, rants about stupid people, religious and political humor, etc. It’s for close people only.

This results in me having around 100 friends, which is trimmed down from over three times that amount. Clean out your list; life is too short to miss important stuff from those you care about because it’s been squelched by those you don’t.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn for me is professional. No surprise there. I friend people on LinkedIn based on the following criteria (at least one of these must be true):

1. I’ve worked with you directly in the past, and the experience was positive
2. I’ve dealt with you in the past, and the experience was positive
3. I know your name, and know you’d be a valuable professional contact

Who’s Not On This List

• People I’ve worked with, or dealt with, who I didn’t have a positive experience with (could be negative, or even just neutral)
• Random people who send me invites

The goal here is to have a list of valuable contacts, not a list of people I’ve met or seen…ever…while in a work environment. That’s not useful to me.

Also, the upside of keeping your list properly groomed like this is that it’s not a problem to post things like Tripit updates because you’re not worried about someone on the list robbing you while you’re away. If you have that problem on LinkedIn then you’re doing it wrong.

Twitter

Twitter for me is public. It’s a realtime stream of events from the public-facing personas of various entities. Friends, companies, whatever. I have simple criteria for who I follow on Twitter (at least one of these must be true):

1. You’re a friend
2. You’re family
3. You’re an associate who posts interesting content
4. You’re a company I enjoy hearing about
5. You’re a personality I enjoy hearing from
6. You’re informative

Who’s Not On This List

• Boring people (yes, there is a different between entertaining mundane and just mundane)
• People who tweet about the fact that they’re tweeting, i.e. they’re so into social media that they aren’t actually using the mediums to talk about life, but rather to talk about talking about it

Twitter is an information source. I follow people in two main groups: 1) those who are close to me (see the Facebook section), and 2) those who contribute input that I find either useful or entertaining.

From Public to Private, But Not the Other Way Around

So let’s summarize here: Facebook is private, LinkedIn is professional, and Twitter is public. Let’s capture that differently by saying you post things to Facebook that you can only tell your friends or family over dinner. You post things to LinkedIn that you wouldn’t mind on a resume, and you post things to Twitter that you wouldn’t mind being brought up…anywhere. Ever.

This illuminates an interesting model for cross-posting, which is the practice of sending content from one social network to another. The general rule I recommend is that you allow content to go from more public to more private, but not the other way around. So I send my Twitter content to Facebook, but I’d never send my Facebook content to Twitter. LinkedIn sits in the middle, so it could receive from Twitter but not from Facebook, while Facebook could pull from both of the others.

Summary

Your attention is the most precious of commodities. Adjust your networks accordingly, and don’t be afraid to be exclusive. ::

People often wonder what others think of them. If you use Twitter to any significant degree there’s a simple way to tell: do a tag cloud on the names of the lists people have added you to.

Mine, for example, are: industry, evolution, technology, infosec, nontheists, developers, tech, neatpeeps, blogs, tech, security, infosec, privacy, etc…

I think this is a much better view of what you’re presenting yourself as than a tag cloud of the content of your posts. When I get a chance I’m going to write a little Ruby deal that’ll pull these, and then I’ll try to figure out how to display them as a cloud. Or maybe there’s an API for this already?

Anyway, yeah. ::

I am really looking forward to the potential of Twitter Lists. Here’s my Information Security list. Ping me if I’ve overlooked you.

[ Daniel Miessler's Twitter Information Security List | twitter.com ]

And here’s my complete list of…lists.

::

There’s a very cool new feature in Twitter called Trends Map. It shows trends…from Twitter…on a map.

/cricket sounds/

Just click the link, dammit. :) It’s a very unique and interesting way to look at what the world is talking about. It really makes 24-hour news channels look pretty damn stupid.

[ Twitter Trends Map | trendsmap.com ]

I was in a bit of a design mood this weekend and decided to redo my Twitter background.

Here’s the full image for anyone interested.

People struggle with why Twitter is special. It’s special because it counters, better than any other technology, the timeless social obstacle of “out of sight, out of mind”. Regardless of how much time you’d spend with a given person if they lived nearby, relationships atrophy when distance comes between you.

The longer someone you care about is gone, the more an invisible barrier grows between you–one that makes it awkward to reinitiate contact. It’s as if loved ones over time somehow change from tangible people into abstract ideas that require effort to interact with. This sinister effect of distance turns best friends into strangers, and technologies such as mobile phones and video conferencing don’t help. They don’t help precisely because the barrier is the initiation of contact, not the ability to communicate once connected.

Twitter solves this problem in a way that no other technology has. Through a stream of common, real-world updates about one’s life, Twitter reminds our fickle, here-focused brains that those we care about are real, and prevents them from disappearing into the world of the abstract. In short, Twitter’s magic is that it’s able to keep close people close regardless of how far they are from each other, which is a feat that no other technology has been able to accomplish. ::

It is considered good social networking etiquette–especially on Twitter–to warn your followers that you are posting a link to content on your own blog or company website.

I hereby reject this for the following reasons:

1. When I follow someone it’s because I think they, on the whole, produce content that I want to read vs. content that I find spammy, boring, or otherwise low-signal-to-noise. If this ever stops being the case, I will no longer follow, and I don’t care at all where that content comes from.
2. If you’re worried that the links I post might be “spam” then we already have a much more serious problem than a labeling issue.
3. The odds of my own content being significantly lower quality than the content I enjoy and share from other sources that you DO enjoy, is low.
4. If I don’t have to warn you before I tell you I am going to get a coffee at Starbucks, then I damn sure am not going to warn you before I refer you to a piece I wrote that I think you might find valuable.

In short, what it really means to warn people that you’re posting your own stuff is:

I wrote this, so it’s probably way lower quality than what I normally post.

But if that were the case, then you probably wouldn’t be following me in the first place.

The whole purpose of social media and networking is to put yourself out there–to share your life and ideas with others. There is simply no more pure way to do this than to show people what you’re thinking and writing about.

So no, I will not shield or obscure my own perception of what I find interesting in what amounts to a preemptively apology. If you like what I normally post then you should also like what I write about. From the follower perspective, you either trust me to post content that is somehow worth your time or you don’t. ::

If you’re into Information Security, and you use Twitter, you probably want to be following @securitytwits.

It’s a group of security professionals and enthusiasts that use Twitter to share ideas. The group is herded by Zach Lanier (@quine), and the list of members can be found here online.

For a decent introduction to the ideas behind the group, here’s a short podcast of Bill Brenner (@billbrenner70) interviewing Zach on the topic of Twitter itself as well as the Security Twits list.

[ Bill Brenner / Zach Lanier | csopodcasts ]

So everyone knows by now that Twitter is getting big. Really big. One of the most important things to figure out with Twitter, both for beginners and experts alike, is how to find interesting people that share your interests.

The challenge is that you don’t want to just follow people indiscriminately because it gets noisy in a hurry, but at the same time you want to expose yourself to new inputs.

Here’s a simple technique that will help immensely:

Using Twitter Search, perform a number of queries for specialized terms relating to your topics of interest, and follow people that are discussing these things intelligently.

Examples

So let’s say you’re like me and are in the Information Security field. Try some queries for:

• “pci qsa”
• “risk controls”
• “static analysis”

The results show a good amount of promise. In fact, I ended up finding @risktical in this test query, and he’s someone I follow already due to our similar interests. That’s a win for the technique.

Or perhaps you’re into Graphics and Design:

• “xhtml logo”
• “typography best”
• “css design”

In both cases the queries returned people in the midst of conversation on the very topics that we enjoy, and sampling this interaction is an excellent way to evaluate someone’s value as a follow.

So in other words, don’t search for value-add people directly. Instead, sneak up from the side by finding those engaged in the types of conversations that you’d like to be part of, and follow the people that are participating. ::

Related

[ When to Blog vs. Tweet | dmiessler.com ]
[ Why Twitter Works | dmiessler.com ]