Connecting, and Cleaning up Social Style Over the Holidays!
As people begin to unwind after Christmas and New years, and get into the swing of things again, I’m here to remind you that you’re not quite out of the woods yet. New Years just took place and with that the time to connect to almost every side of the family, and almost all your friends is here again! Even if you’re like me… not necessarily the most social person out there, there are some things that you should probably keep in mind: the digital cleaning time is coming. And you can get a head start.
Connecting to Friends or Family … the Digital Way!
There are many ways to connect to family and friends in a personal and visual way across multiple networks. The first is probably one most people will try to use to get a hold of everyone: Facebook. About a year ago they implemented a video call system (built on Skype’s infrastructure) that you can “call” somebody (as long as they’re online, that is) and have a personal one to one video chat. Of course if you want to connect to more than one person and plan things, setting up a group, or even a group message is a great way to get it done. The second method that comes to mind is Google+ Events.
First off, from the very beginning they’ve made things very easy to manage. But hold on… how are Events supposed to help me connect? Though events have been out for quite some time now, they’re still an essential holiday planning tool. And not just while you’re organizing, but also during and after the actual event itself. When you’re at the party or get together, there’s all these people with smartphones taking pictures but it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever see all of them. The cool part about events is that as multiple people take pictures, and as long as they’re members of the event, every photo they take will be shared to the Event stream. So you can see them in real time. That was just the cool part, the really cool part? Hook a laptop or computer up to computer take all the photos and start a slideshow and watch as they come in. Kind of cool eh? Also probably the more obvious method of seeing people is by setting up a Google+ Hangout. Like Facebook you get a very stable video system going. Unlike Facebook however, you can have up to 10 people in the hangout at once. Lots more opportunity to connect to all the relatives in one sitting. The cool part too is that even if they aren’t at your party they can still add photos to the event, making for one massive collection of photos across multiple locations.
Where To Start on the Clean Up Mission
There are a lot of places to start and most likely the first place will be your most used social network, whether its Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, cleaning out the amount of content you view and who is also viewing yours is a pretty big deal. Best way to try and reduce this is by straight up weeding out the friends/contacts/connections, that have no value to you anymore. This is a great first step, but another great place to go is to try and clean out all the different pages that you follow. Especially on Facebook where it’s so easy to like a page, and then continuously receive updates. (It’s also a good time to double check that no pages have been liked unintentionally). Twitter is also very easy to follow people and brands, and luckily it’s also just as easy to remove some that really don’t have any use.
Keep in mind this is just a starting place, and there are tons of other ways to connect with your friends, and probably way more stuff to clean up too (email I’m looking at you). But with that in mind I hope it gives you an idea of where to start, Or if you’re like me, and usually take care of things as they come up. Awesome. Sit back, chillax, and enjoy the holidays!