Friday, July 8, 2011

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

If I've learned anything over the past 5 years it's that change is inevitable. I've also learned that one should react to change like one should react to a fall: Relax until it's over! Don't try to stop it once it has started or try to break your fall and it will be a lot less painful.

There has been a lot of change in my life over the past 2 weeks and I haven't had time to let my Virgo brain process it all, yet. Some people view all change as bad, some think it's all good but I'm gonna go all Forrest Gump on you and say, "I think it's a little of both, maybe" (although Forrest wasn't talking about change). Because I like to be on the positive/optimistic side of things, I've decided to write about some of the good change.

I remember back in 2006, sitting in my office which was off of the employee break room at B&N. They weren't offering free wireless back then and I had purchased a subscription and allowed the other employees to use it, too. One of my favorite co-workers popped her head into my office one day and told me,

"You should join Facebook."

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's like Myspace, only better."

After a couple of promptings, I sat down and created my account. After adding my current city as a network, I decided to add my university to my networks as well. I entered the name of my college, selected it from the list and clicked "add". Up pops a window!

"Enter your college email address:" [what? Is this a joke? We didn't have email when I was in college!]

My start with Facebook was shaky, but I hung in there and what my friend said proved to be true. It was better than Myspace. I started a campaign to bring all my friends over to Facebook and one-by-one, I wore them down. Facebook is the place I go to find out what's going on in the lives of my friends. A daily read-through of my news feed fills me in on all the good news, the bad news, birthday parties, baseball/soccer/tennis games, graduations, vacations, etc..... and I don't even have to make a single phone call or send any emails.

Last week my trendsetting friend sent me a loophole invite to try Google+, a social networking venture brought to us by.........you guessed it! Google. I've never been a fan of Google because of some of their privacy policies, but let's face it, if one uses the internet on a daily basis, you're giving up some of your privacy, whether you know it or not. So, I plunged in and have been using Google+ for a week.

So far, it's okay. It's very similar to Facebook except much quieter. I'm not ready to start harassing my friends to switch yet and I might not ever but, for now I'm sticking with it because my friend was right about Facebook........she's probably right about this too.

If you want an invite to join Google+ and have a gmail account, let me know and I'll send one to you.

No comments: