YJL

1   Communication channel

Let’s face it, nowadays it’s harder and harder to find an email address than a Twitter username of Facebook when you are reading someone’s website. Funny thing is, it may be even harder to find the real name. Yeah, social, right.

To heck it more, once I had seen a blog experiencing using tweets as comments, exclusively. That’s utterly absurd to me. I could not believe when I was looking for a comment form to input my 2 cents.

“Are you serious?” I shouted at my monitor. Needless to say, I couldn’t comment and I’d considered to unsubscribe.

Anyway, I finally realized that I should keep the channel open for me and others, for either direction of communication. Although I now use them, I don’t see them as real way of communication or having a conversation.

Everyone has its own preference, I like email, some like Twitter, some may not even have those accounts. Everybody is different. Sometimes, it may be situational when someone tries to contact another person. He or she may choose different contact method depending on the nature of the communication or what device is currently in hand.

It may be beneficial for providing as many as you can. You don’t have to be using them as long as you have notifications set up correctly, you won’t be missing anything people have sent to you.

2   Sign-up option

Registering on a website doesn’t take much of time, but if you can register without needing a new password, that would be much better. Who can really memorize all of their strong passwords? There is no safe way to store your passwords, until mind reading is invented, your brain is the most secure storage for the passwords. Unfortunately, you can’t remember everything.

Here is a screenshot showing you that a common alternative log-in methods:

It seems little more websites are now providing log in with Google, Twitter, or Facebook accounts. Sometimes, it’s only either Twitter or Facebook account is allowed. So, you have to have both of them plus a Google account.

With this option, it’s only a click or two to log into a website. You don’t even need to type in username or email address. Of course, no password is required.

3   How am I going to use them?

For pure contact, not for tweeting; and for sign-up and log-in. I will not post or share anything on them, just for some quick message, a good example is like:

Just to notify someone about some issue or get notified. That would be all my tweet would look like.

You can see the tweet was a week behind the post, it’s sad to see even CNN doesn’t get notified when there is a problem with their content. I really don’t know why people are so reluctant to contact for making things better when they already have means to contact. Instead, they tweet or re-tweet things ain’t worth.

This is one thing to motive me to go back to Twitter and Facebook, so I can keep more channels opened. I logged in and tweeted to get that link fixed and I knew my tweet had made something better.

Regardless my channels are opened now, I know you can only rely on yourself when it’s about issues, and that’s same reason I wrote my own link checker. I had about 200-300 broken links of around 5,000 links on this blog. And some links were in my most popular posts, no one even left a comment about that. I had to find out on my own and fix them. I felt my blog isn’t worth anything, but now looked at that CNN post, well, this is how it is: No one really cares.

My view towards social networks still stay unchanged, however, I can choose to use them different, more or less like a pretty short email. I don’t plan on engaging a back-and-forth conversation with anyone, if that kind of communication is expected, then I will suggest continuing the conversation via email.

As I said, email is still my favorite way of communication, even just to let someone know a teeny error:

This email definitely can be fit into a tweet and that blogger has Twitter account I believe. But mail client’s search function is much better than Twitter’s and Facebook’s, another reason why I prefer email. I will only use Twitter and Facebook when there is no other apparent options available.

For years, I always thought social networking website can only be like the way it is and that’s the cause why I left. To be honest, I’d done the same thing like everyone else on those websites until I slowly started to realize that’s not “social,” not the same as you see in real life. Admittedly, it’s in a virtual world, but still I don’t like how people socialize on Internet if you can really call it socialize.

I’ve learned you can change the way you look at something and you can use it different. Don’t let people define how you can do and don’t fall into social norms. It will only narrow your view and make you think like everyone else.

There is a whole world outside the box.

4   Related posts

• Posting to Twitter, Google+, and Facebook after Google Reader due retired
• Social networking obstacle