Stream of consciousness

Published at Social Disclosure, a PR & Social Media blog.

I promise not to let my Facebook habits ruin my Twitter experience.

That’s the vow I made when I first joined Twitter. It’s the decision I faced on the third step:

1. Create an account.

2. Decide if the account should be public or private.

3. The Facebook Factor.

So I created a private account, meaning I could feel more comfortable about sharing more personal details about my everyday life in real time.

But even with a “locked” account, friend requests pop up from three different kinds of people:

1. Real friends.

2. People who live in the area and may know you.

3. Odd people or businesses that you’ve never heard of before.

If you’re crazy, you’ll accept people from all three edges of the spectrum. On Facebook, I limited myself to the first two categories of “friends,” worried that I might offend someone who knew me if I couldn’t remember their name, or even worse, their face.

And now I’ve ended up with 2,000 Facebook friends. I might know 400 of them.

Quite honestly, that worries me.

So when I discovered Twitter, I set the law… I won’t add you, if I don’t know you.

And now I have a list of strangers, in both accounts, who want access to my account, and they just pile up as I magically hope to recognize them one day and invite them in.

If you’ve been following the social news as of late, you know doubt no (yes, it was intentional) that Facebook is preparing an all-intensive assault against tiny-but-swelling rival Twitter.

Soon it will be easier than ever to send out status updates that eerily resemble tweets. It will be commonplace for businesses and for users.

So Facebook strikes the spellbinding chord, and Twitter accounts suddenly dry up like springs run dry, but do I switch?

Certainly it’s a brilliant notion to integrate the Twitter service I love so much with the Facebook service I use so frequently, but something holds me back.

I started Twitter as a real-time diary, as a timeline of thoughts and actions, life. No wonder it makes sense to push that just a step further and shove it into a box holding my every photo and video.

But my dilemma is this:

When your Facebook profile serves as a PR representation of yourself, and your Twitter serves as a diary of personality, marrying the two results in some kind of conflict.

Do I want 1,600 strangers reading about where I am and what’s on my mind?

It’s definitely possible to cram all of my legit pals into a single friends list and grant them sole rights to my status updates, but here’s my issue:

There are times when you want your status to be that private diary and there are times that you want to announce (or advertise) a message to as broad an audience as possible.

For instance, “Harrison is watching CNN while eating tacos on the top of the National Press Building with Greg and Jezerey,” could easily be TMI for most “friends.” In reality, do strangers really care? And if they do, then I don’t want them caring.

But a post like “Harrison just blogged about the top ten most exciting things in D.C. Check it out by clicking here,” is something I’d want to send to as many people as possible. It comes back to the whole personal/PR representation.

While it’s possible to make your personal life your broadcasted or “PR” life, it’s a stunt reserved more so for celebrities, or people that strangers really do care about or feel as if they have a connection with.

Facebook could solve the problem by allowing two streams of status updates or sharing, but unless such a move was optional, it would further complicate Facebook.

The company realizes that people put on varying personas for different groups, such as business and family and classmates. Therefore, friend lists were developed.

In the upcoming redesign of the network’s homepage, the company places a particular emphasis on these friend lists in the news feed or “stream.”

It’s a new revelation that people either:

1. Add strangers that they just don’t want to see news from

2. Want to see news sorted by the areas of their social lives, rather than a jumbled mess, or

3. Keep looking for a Twitter-esque solution that focuses only on a single specific group, based on degree of interaction.

Another problem that emerges, both in Twitter and on Facebook, is social archiving.

Blogs take on a sort of non-linear state with drop-down menus or visual representations of calendars that can easily transport visitors back in time.

Twitter and Facebook are both competing to become the primary stakeholder in the very life of every human.

Our memories, our photos, our videos, our comments, our shared items, our discussions, our status updates, our location, all recorded in one single place.

Everything we hold valuable trusted as the responsibility of one company.

That’s why Google’s jealous. Google may have our search history and our YouTube videos, but it doesn’t have our life.

This is one reason that users get so upset when they’re booted from Facebook for one reason or another. This is why there’s such an audible scuffle over the terms of use at Facebook and the ownership of content.

In the world of tomorrow, when contact lenses record video, our mind has a direct link to sending tweets, and our discussions are recorded to reflect on, recall – the social timeline – is going to be more important than ever.

Companies like Facebook and Twitter and Google realize this now. The race has begun. It’s a competition for the users. Why else would Facebook be so scared of Twitter?

Take a look at cell phone companies, for example. There’s barely anyone in the United States who doesn’t have a cellular phone. The market is saturated. That’s precisely why keeping customers is so important. People stay locked into a cell phone plan through contracts, and new gadgets and new services.

In fact, the only way to apparently convert users now is through a Trojan Horse like the iPhone.

About half of all customers who sign up for the iPhone with AT&T now have never had a contract with the company before.

It’s all about locking in as many users as possible and keeping them locked in for as long as possible.

To be successful in the development of the social timeline, Facebook and Twitter must integrate an easy way to search the past of individual users, by keyword and date.

Facebook almost paid $500 million to acquire Twitter last year. Instead, it’s decided to compete head-on.

But even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, sees a high value in communicating publicly through Twitter.

Just today it was revealed that the the company’s CEO has his own public Twitter feed, in addition to his private one.

Companies and PR professionals have always known that it’s important to be an integral part in the lives of customers and potential customers. Simply put, that’s the real value of social networks.

By finding a place on the timeline of the common man, a company ensures a personal part of at least one man’s history. And if the Web has taught us anything, one reference is a thousand references.

Social networking isn’t about talking to friends, it isn’t about sharing photos or tweets. Social networking is about life.

The companies understand that fact much more than the plebeians who in many cases blindly use such online software.

The gun went off a few years ago but the runners are neck and neck just a few feet from the starting line. Even Twitter, who got a late start, is catching up quickly.

The top 5 Lee buildings that should be demolished

Published at the Editor's Weblog, the blog for the managing editor of the Lee Clarion.

The Beach science building is getting the demolition ax this summer, and Hughes Hall may likely receive the same fate in the years to come, so I can't help but wonder...

Which buildings on the Lee University campus are next in line for the chop?

So, I present my suggestions. The following buildings need to go to make way for better facilities at Lee:

5. The Conn Center

First of all, take a look at the Conn Center. The neo-Seventies design hardly fits in with today's classic but modern scheme adopted in newer buildings across campus. The balcony lacks any sort of handicapped access, and the cathedral skylights, grand orchestra pit and built-in ceiling speakers have been abandoned. The walls have cracked, the foundation called weak, in general, the building has a bit of an image problem, and I haven't even mentioned the orange seats and outdated choir lofts.

The campus could use a whole new auditorium, built to today's standards, able to seat the entire student body at once. Such a massive undertaking would no doubt be expensive, but it certainly would be worth it.

4. Walker Memorial

If you want to point a finger at the plainest building on campus, look no further. A cheaply-built square, Walker Memorial fits three floors of mundane classrooms plus a windowless attic into its entirely handicapped-inaccessible frame. The stairs can be tiring to trudge, and unless you're a fan of the jumbo-sized bathrooms on the first floor (The sink room is larger than most faculty offices), there's not much to like about the building.

Why does it stick around? Classroom space. Once the new mathematics wing opens at the new science building, faculty offices and classes will move from Walker Memorial, bringing the aging structure one step closer to uselessness.

3. Higginbotham Administration Building

If you've ever seen an old photo of Lee, you might have spotted a grandiose structure connected to the old brick Centenary building at the front of campus.

Old Main, as it was called, served both the Methodist Women's College and Bob Jones College before Lee occupied the campus. It was a graceful building from a more aesthetic era.

When Old Main was demolished, it was replaced with a Hughes-Hall style office building. From the inside and the outside, the building is simply ordinary. For a structure that serves as the crux of campus, Higginbotham does nothing special to welcome guests or visitors. If the building were constructed today, it would likely feature some sort of commanding apex, similar to the clock tower at the Humanities Center or the bell tower at the PCSU.

The building is too cramped to fit all of the administrative aspects of Lee, as evidenced most recently by the move of the human resources department. In addition, alumni relations and other academic services have been housed outside of the building to save space.

It doesn't fit Centenary. It doesn't compliment history. An updated building would provide the university with a whole new chance to impress and excite prospective students. It would serve as an offering to higher education.

2. Center for Calling and Career

If Dr. Conn has the vision to remove Hughes Hall to improve the postcard-atmosphere of the new science and math building, there's no doubt there will be talk about razing the Center for Calling and Career.

The center, which is squeezed into an old house on the edge of campus (much like the health clinic once was), has become a blemish on the Lee landscape. It's like the annoying kid sticking his hand in front of the camera at the last second to mar a beautiful image.

If the university had had the money and foresight at the time, I believe it would have been in the best interest to combine offices for the center into the recently built Leonard Center, perhaps boosting the building an additional level. By solving the spacial dilemma earlier, the university would not have to worry about where to relocate the office now when (not if) it chooses to demolish the ugly house.

1. Nora Chambers, Tharp and Simmons Halls

Three dorms located on prime property in the center of campus, adjacent to both the pedestrian mall and the dining hall, Tharp, Simmons and Nora Chambers represent the worst and perhaps the ugliest architecture at Lee.

Parts of the buildings were never meant to house dorm rooms, in fact the first floor of Nora chambers was once made up entirely of classroom space. The old fire escapes are archaic, the rooms are sometimes tiny, the lounges compressed.

If Lee could undergo the challenge of replacing every bed in those dorms elsewhere on campus, and find a temporary solution for campus safety, it would likely be in the best interest of the university to demolish it all and start anew.

The space is valuable and could make an excellent spot for a centerpiece on Lee's campus, one that would compliment the old (Centenary) and the new (Humanities) from each respective direction.