TwilightPad

I’m not sure why I’m surprised. And in some ways, I’m not. It’s just interesting to watch how people will behave given total anonymity.

On Facebook, people may get a little wild or risque, but never unruly. After all, their friends and maybe family and possibly coworkers will see them “act out” and form negative opinions of them. They don’t want that (usually). So they behave. For the most part.

On TwilightPad, given full anonymity, people don’t have that same ability to be shamed into acting responsibly, or at least not unruly. No one knows who they are.

It’s an interesting social quandary in terms of what we would want the site to develop into. You want to allow them as much leeway as possible (without letting them stray into defamatory stuff). But just because it’s legit and not defamatory doesn’t mean it’s valuable. How do you separate the truly valuable information on the site from the chatter? From the hostile? From the immature?

That might be the next feature to work on. Because if I’m coming to the site, interested in poking around for information about a company (let’s assume I’m just merely curious), there’s no way I’m going to sift thru threads that can be 300 comments long. It’s almost as though there has to be some sort of elevation of valuable and informative comments and maybe segregate them for easier consumption.

LinkedIn used to provide decent value to me as an end user, but lately I found myself using it less and less. At first, it was a cool and simple idea — link up to all the people you know in your professional world. It helped a little (very little) in the occasional job search, but not really. Once I linked up to my former coworkers, now what?

I don’t chat with them there? Not really. There’s MySpace or Facebook for that. Or, for more immediate gratification, there’s Skype, AIM, Yahoo IM, etc. Or the phone.

For all the Ajax UI goodies on their site, and buttons and links here and there to do this and that, LinkedIn at the end of the day is one thing: a public resume. Don’t let the flair fool you. It’s all about your resume. And that’s my beef with it.

Got a promotion recently? Cool. Run to LinkedIn and brag about it. Now all your friends can be impressed.

But what about layoffs? When you got canned, did you run to LinkedIn to fill in all the details? Probably not. More likely, you conveniently left your old job and title on there. Unless you change some privacy settings, as soon as you change your status, everyone and their mother is going to know you got laid off because LinkedIn will blast your now sorry ass situation to your network in a weekly email.

The stigma of being laid off is not as big of a deal as it used to be. Definitely not right now anyway. But that misses the point. LinkedIn seems to serve as a measuring stick to people.

“Holy shit…he’s a Director? No way.”

“OMG…this woman can’t hold a job…look how many times she keeps moving on”.

And so on.

And this brings me full circle to the original point. I happened to get one of those weekly LinkedIn status updates recently and couldn’t help but notice a friend of mine got laid off. I noticed another former coworker took a job that’s probably a level beneath what he’s capable of, but I can understand why he took the job given the current economy.

This was depressing to me. To me, these are real people. I remember them and know them as people, with quirks and habits and things they found funny. And good work they did. But that email update left me a cold impression that these people weren’t people, but just titles.

It’s like LinkedIn said to me:

“Dave got laid off, Jim took a shitty job, and Dawn still hasn’t landed a job yet”.

Gee, thanks. It wasn’t in those words exactly, but it had the same net effect on me. Maybe I’m reading too much into LinkedIn and the premise behind it. I get the social networking thing. But I guess it’s the “your worth as a person is measured by your title” thing that just leaves me feeling cold.

But take away the resume from LinkedIn and you have….Facebook/MySpace.

Two months into the launch of the site, we didn’t see it coming — the site is nearly dominated by layoff news.  Granted, it was always meant to be a part of the site, just not the overwhelming majority of the site.

When we started building the site based on an simple idea, the first wave of the massive layoffs were just beginning.  Then came December and all hell broke loose.  Then came January and even more layoffs were announced.  We’re now into February and it…just…won’t…end.

I’m not sure what will happen first:  people will get sick of the layoffs or sick of reading about the layoffs.  Hell, I’m sick of reading about the layoffs.  It’s such a depressing topic.  Depressing topics make for a depressing site.  But I can’t change reality.  This is what’s happening out there.  Some days, traffic is up.  Some days, people just don’t want anything to do with layoffs.

But it has to end.  The layoffs have to end some time.  I’m curious to see how the site will change when that transition occurs.

Yes, it was probably a good idea to snag twilightpad.wordpress.com, if for no other reason than we might make more use of it than we’re currently planning.

Maybe, we’ll start the blog here and move it over to the www.twilightpad.com domain.  We’ll figure it out as we go…