Today being April 1st the web is awash with April Fool’s jokes and pranks.
Some of them are pretty clever, while some of them are downright silly.
One that caught my eye was LinkedIn’s
If you go into the “people you may know” section you’re in for a surprise:
LinkedIn April Fool Joke 2011
LinkedIn has been around for several years. For many professionals, including recruiters, it is “the” social network that they use.
Unfortunately they seem to have “lost” their main page:
The URL is correct
But the content seems to have gone AWOL:
The home page of LinkedIn - throwing a 404
Germany seems to take privacy pretty seriously.
According to reports this week Germany is seeking to enact legislation that would restrict the usage of information about prospective employees garnered from social media sites by employers. The legislators are drawing a line between “pure” social networking site and the more professional ones.
“The bill would allow managers to search for publicly accessible information about prospective employees on the Web and to view their pages on job networking sites, like LinkedIn or Xing. But it would draw the line at purely social networking sites like Facebook, said Philipp Spauschus, a spokesman for the Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière”
No idea how they’ll classify Twitter or FourSquare .. though I can see FourSquare being used to keep track of supposedly sick staff … .. Or am I just cynical?
Full story here
Social media networks; Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace etc., etc.
How many of your “friends” are actual friends? How many of them actually care about YOU?
If you’re completely caught up in the “follower count race”, then you’ve probably already entered “social media hell”.
But.
There is light at the end of the tunnel
You can disconnect.
You can reconnect with real people. I know this may sound shocking, but you could try to actually interact with a real person for a change.
Forget about vampires, random farm animals, mafia members or fantasy beasts (Twitter is infested with unicorns.. )
Removing yourself from all the social network sites takes time, so some nice person has actually automated the process – the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine does it all for you
Here’s how it works:
WEB 2.0 Suicide Machine Promotion from moddr_ on Vimeo.
So there you are. You can save yourself from social media. You can get back your REAL life.
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