“Why Facebook is really like high school”

It was probably obvious to everyone else, but until I read an article by Thomas Weber that a friend posted on Facebook, I didn’t understand why my status updates and comments sometimes took so long to appear (if at all) when other people's popped up in the blink of an eye.

At the end of the day, successful social networks like Facebook and Twitter have millions (billions!) of feeds, status updates and other postings. They can’t put everything up there. So they use complicated algorithms (and I’m still not sure what that means, though I like the idea of a former US Vice President playing jazz guitar).

These algorithms are instructions which filter the feeds based on how many friends, followers you have, how many comments or re-tweets your postings have earned: the bottom line is you have to be popular to become popular.

And you need to be ‘active’. You can’t be a couch potato surfing the channels. You need post regular updates and feeds.

But back to point one. Those updates need to be interesting. People need to retweet or comment for you to earn the right ‘jock of the class’ points. “Just had to wait 20 minutes on Shooters Hill for the 486” probably won’t get you noticed as well as “Just read a great blog on using social media for dummies (with link)”. Well that’s my hope.

That’s why this blog is here. The aim is to make it interesting (and please be prepared for the odd random picture. It just brightens up a blogspot page) so people might want to read it. And to give me something worthwhile to update.

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