Google’s track record with social networks hasn’t been awesome. If I was in their shoes, I would say the same thing, just in case it flunks like the rest of it. “ooh no, we’re not competing against Facebook or Twitter… No. Good heavens, no.” Yeah right.  Like Douglas Adams said: “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.”

Don’t get me wrong, with all those sour sounding grapes, I like Google+ (and grapes). Granted, my liking Google+ has a lot to do with my dislike of Facebook and boredom of Twitter. I just wish Google didn’t confuse people further with this “not a social network” business. People have just gotten comfortable with Facebook and the idea of social networking sites… Let’s just leave it at that. You have reinvented the wheel, and that’s great. I’m loving some of the features of Google compared to Facebook and Twitter… (See, comparisons are inevitable because it is so similar.) I especially like Circles and the fact not everyone need to be mutual friends.

So there. Quack.

Constructive criticism: You call this an effin' sock?

Unfortunately, it is very common for a website to create a culture of bitchyness if the administrators fail to discipline members early on. In the worst case scenario the bitchyness starts with the admins themselves, in which case the site is doomed to it. If the admins don’t know how to behave in a supportive manner, nobody else has a chance turning the site around. I have witnessed this with many websites. One that springs to mind was a community for photographers; the idea was to share your photos for “constructive criticism from your peers”. You can bet that when a new photographer is revealing their work for the first time to a knowledgeable audience and is greeted with nothing but bitchiness, nastiness and sarcasm, (nothing constructive about it) there is no way he or she will continue using that service. When they realize that it’s not really about their photos, but that everyone gets the same treatment, they may feel a little better about it but will find that the site has nothing to offer to them. On a site like this, meanness spreads like wild fire: If you said a nasty thing about my photo, don’ think I can’t find something wrong with ALL OF YOURS, you bitch!

It is completely up to you to set the tone on your websites. You cannot allow ANY rudeness to occur without reacting to it strongly and with as little fuss as possible -meaning that you cannot make it public (will easily result into a public flame war), but you will have to contact the offending member privately and let them understand that rudeness is not tolerated and if he doesn’t clean up his act, he’s good as gone. To fit in, people usually modify their behaviour to suit the surroundings. It is very unrewarding to be the only bitch in a group (because it’s not “fashionable” in the said group), but when you get one “friend”, on board, then another one… An yet and other one, THEN it starts feeling pretty damned cool. If you do not allow the first two bitches to bond, your site will be fairly safe to build on. As your site grows, you need to implement some sort of a report member (and post) -system to help you weed out the bad apples efficiently and without exception. You may put in a zero tolerance policy or a three strikes you’re out -policy, but you do have to be consistent about it. Sometimes people acting rudely are so ashamed of their behaviour that they’ll remove themselves after being corrected by the site admin. They may do this throwing shit at you during departure, but the reason they are departing is not because of you, it’s because they realize that going back into the group of nice people after what they said would be inconceivably embarrassing. And in all honesty, you don’t have anything against a rude person leaving your site. In fact, that’s the best thing that can happen to it. (If they don’t leave but keep bullying people, you can then give them a full ban and be rid of them.)

It is equally important not to let this policing go too far. It is not a relaxed place either if nobody is entitled to an opinion if it’s the least bit provocative (like, say being childfree) or a member is penalised for using words like “big head” describing a doll, because some member happened to be bullied by that name at school. Sometimes the victims can bully the community by being so overly sensitive, that everything reduces them into tears forcing the actually nice people tread around these sensitive souls like they were walking on broken glass. You can not allow this happen either. Everyone is allowed their own space, and their own thoughts and expression, but when one person tries to manipulate the space and dominate other’s way of thinking, speaking and expressing themselves one way or another, it is not cool. As a generic rule, if your first thought to a complaint is “don’t be ridiculous” or “grow a pair”, it’s probably about the member being manipulative instead actually in need of protection. (Unless you are inclined to being a bully yourself, in which case I don’t know how effective measurement this is.)

Even if a general balance is achieved, there’s always people who are so timid, that someone with a little more oomph to themselves will make an other feel inferior. You can’t help that. People are not created equal in talent and self-esteem, and if one person’s shine will make the other feel like she or he is sitting in a shadow then that’s how it’s going to be. It is not fair to ask a superiorly talented person to hide their candle so that others wouldn’t feel bad about themselves, any more than it is fair to belittle the untalented because their candle can’t shine as bright as the other ones.

The reasons I post a comment:

1) I read a blog post that is a fairly good one, but could be better. I have something to add or point out.

2) What the blogger said was so god damned idiotic, that I just have to tell them how things REALLY are.

Then there’s two reasons for not commenting:

1) The post was so pointless that it would be waste of my time to say anything.

2) The post was SO GOOD, that it would be pointless to say anything, because the only thing to add would be: “Hey, great post” and that reeks of someone after your Google Juice.

Now, the thing for you to do is to decide whether your posts are god damned pointless or simply amazing, and figure out which is the more likely reason for the lack of comments.

A simple way to avoid this without going to technical details about privacy settings and the sort is simply use an email address you wouldn’t normally use – create a new one for Facebook only if you want to. Then YOU can go around looking for people YOU want to add and not be ambushed by your bosses ex-wife’s crazy cousin.

Clearly if people will search for you using your name they will find you by default, but it is fairly unlikely your bosses ex-wife’s crazy cousin will be searching for you like that. By the time she finds you, you have learned that it’s okay to decline a friendship invitation and it won’t be such a big deal any more.

Photo of a child on man’s avatar. Probably the last time any woman told him he was cute.

Photo of a child on woman’s avatar. A stay at home mother who has nothing else to talk about but her kids. (Probably uses a screen name such as “MomOf2″.)

Just the eye. Seeks a deep contact with people while trying to remain anonymous and appear soulful. Kind of works but is quite unoriginal and thus utterly forgettable.

Popular cartoon character – A male who is trying the “boyish charm” angle although it has never worked for anyone. We’ve seen enough of Vinnie the Pooh and friends already! Original cartoon characters by the man/woman behind the avatar, are encouraged though!

Disproportioned photo - An avatar of a casual Internet user who hasn’t yet found the delights of Photoshopping. (Has uploaded a photo straight from the camera, without shaping it into a square first.) Unprofessional.

Logo – impersonal. Is here to sell me something.

The vast majority of people prefer the picture of a person in an avatar over a logo or other graphic. People want to speak to people. If your avatar is listed amongst several others (like recent visitors list), the likelihood that you’ll get a click is higher if it’s your face in there. But, sometimes you need to put that logo up there. Another thing is, that if you’re using your photo, it gets boring after a while, and intolerable to you when you get a better photo of yourself. But the problem arises, that people get confused if you change your avatar. They won’t remember who you are for a while, until you say something really characteristic to yourself. I believe I found a solution to both of these problems. You are not likely to change your logo too often, right? So why not use that together with your photograph?

Here are some of my recent avatars:

See what I mean? There are elements in the avatar that stay constant while I get bored with the rest of it – me. :p This of course requires some Photoshop skills, but nothing too complicated. This also gives you the option of using different theme in the photos while still tying them to yourself. The one I’m holding my dog is used on social sites for field spaniel owners. The one I hold a pen in, is designed for my writer’s profile.

Lastly, it’s a good idea to upload your avatar to Gravatar, which is a centralized avatar storage, that will allow you to link a photo to your email address. This way when you comment on a blog (all that have Gravatar enabled) will fetch your photo that matches the email address you used. Sweet.

Frankly, if I had stayed on Twitter.com alone, I still wouldn’t get it. Twitter.com is very basic compared to all the services surrounding it. Who has time to hang out on one site all the time anyway? Not me – and I’m not doing anything that important. Twitter is supposed to keep you up-to-date to the minute, but who on Earth has time to stare at the public Twitter update stream to come up with something even remotely interesting? So I downloaded a couple of desktop Tweeting programs to make it easier to update and follow. But quite frankly, even that didn’t really get me much anywhere.

Then I found Tweetlater.com and their keyword alerts. It sends me an email summary of tweets that have certain keyword in them, every 4 hours. I can quickly read it through to see what people are saying right now about social networking for example. Most of the time, they don’t say anything that interesting. It only takes that one tweet though, that will spark your interest and get you somewhere. The thing is that the bulk of bloggers don’t say anything interesting or helpful either. Most of the time, they write the same stuff over and over – 10 steps to successful blogging, 13 great tutorials, 15 rules to great web design blah blah blah, heard it all before and wrote about it already. It takes you a lot longer to check if a blog has any useful information to you, or anything you’d find remotely entertaining, rather than read through a bunch of Tweets.

Sure, you may miss a great article on Twitter because of a badly structured tweet, but if the tweet is good, chances are that the blogger can actually write – something that you can’t take granted these days. Being witty and to the point in 140 marks or less is a good test for your self-expression skills.
You’ll also be able to quite quickly put your finger on the latest trends. For example, I have a keyword “Finland” on my keyword alert. It took me one summary to learn, that postcrossing is huge in Finland. About 70% of Tweets concerning Finland were about writing a postcard to Finland or receiving a postcrossing-card from Finland. (After I learned this, I told Tweetlater to ignore messages about cards thank you very much.)

During the last 2 weeks I found out that promoting your blog on Twitter is more effective than StumbleUpon – at least if you’re a small-timer like myself. Stumble relies on thumbs up and your readers stumbling your posts, while Twitter… You tweet it, and if you’re lucky (good) someone will retweet it, because it’s easy. It takes about half a second compared to properly stumbling it (for the first time). My advice: If you have those share-buttons on your blog and you had to choose only one, choose Twitter.

Another important thing to know as a blogger, is that you can automatically tweet your blog posts by using TwitterFeed. In addition, there are few services that will update your Twitter status, but a word of warning… Avoid loops! I went tweet-rss crazy myself, and added every feed I could think of to every service I could, and ended up having the same update appear first on Facebook, which updated Twitter, which updated Facebook, which updated Twitter… And so forth. You don’t want to annoy your followers by doing that! I was lucky nobody reported me as a spam bot before I realised what was happening!

The most awesome thing about Twitter is that it is actually very social. A lot of other social networks could easily just drop the “social” off and be more accurate. Because there’s nothing else to do on Twitter than send messages to people and read them, you won’t get side tracked by millions of applications and editing your profile all the time. How many of you confess to staring at their own profile page thinking what else to add, while hardly ever visiting other people’s profiles? Twitter has stripped everything else off the menu and sticks with the main thing: Socialising. On Twitter, reading other people’s content is even more rewarding than sending out your own. That’s just fantastic.

And for some reason, hearing “follow me on Twitter” isn’t nearly as irritating as the normal “add me as a friend” even though you can’t possibly know who I am. Twitter is public by definition, so following thousands of people is completely allowed, unlike on many other social networking sites. So, follow me on Twitter, only if you want, of course.

I know it is daunting to put your photo up there. I chose to use a series of photos, as currently, after having shaved all of my hair off when I turned 30, I am now growing my hair and I bloody well hate it. Having a series of random photos up there, will give me the satisfaction of telling people that I haven’t always had bad hair! Anyway, I would still put my image up there even if I was’t happy about the way I look, or have ever looked, because it gives people an idea of who I am, and why I think this way. Believe it or not, the way we look will also have an effect on how we view the world. “All men are pigs” will sound different when women looking different say that, don’t you agree?

If you have the looks, don’t hide it! You should not underestimate the value of good looks when it comes to attracting readership. People will deny that they would read blogs based on the good looks of the blogger, but deep down we all know we do… Not that it would be nearly the only thing that matters, just that it has an effect that is important enough to take a note off. Let’s put it this way; having the right meta tags will not bring you as many readers as your good looks.

One more thing that speaks for portraying your image; trust. If you have the guts to put your photo up there, and still say what you say, it gives the impression that you do stand behind what you say. We all know what anonymity does to you online. When you comment on discussion boards or to an article, if you are ashamed of what you say, you won’t be posting that thing with your name attached to it, let alone a photo. What ever you say with your name and face attached to it creates trust. Quite frankly, I don’t really give a damn about what some flower or cartoon character says on a discussion board, but I will take a good look at posts that are decorated with a real face.

If you want them to take you seriously, show them your face.

UPDATE: I just joined a fashion network and searched through the local people. There waren’t many so it was quick. However I found a couple of models that didn’t have an avatar. I almost bursted out laughing. I mean seriously, what does it tell about a model if she doesn’t have an avatar?

1. Discussions on this board are to be written in good humour. Any user that is creating and promoting negativity by in any way provoking other users on this board can be banned for set period of time or permanently according to case-by-case consideration by the administrator.

2. Humour needs to be funny – do not try to insult a fellow member and cover it with humour.

3. Tasteful erotic / sexual content is allowed. Health related topics are welcome. Pornographic photos and texts are not allowed. (If you are not sure if your content is okay, ask the moderators or administrator.)

4. All content provided by you remains yours. The site does not claim any copyrights of sent material. Also, you are responsible for any content you send, and remain so in all circumstances.

5. All content on restricted user areas like “members only” or “certain members only” sections is to be kept between the allowed users. Mentioning this content is allowed if the people in question remain unidentifiable. (Take into account the situation and their friends, who may know enough to put two + two together.) Understandably it is hard to control, and hard to judge, but it would be too much to ask of members to never mention anything to their spouses for example.

6. Do not rate users expecting them to rate you back. Positive feed back systems are to give an accurate idea of a user, not to promote a popularity contest.

7. Any harassment of members via public or private messages result to an immediate ban. Harassment includes but is not restricted to unwanted sexual comments, repeated dating requests, insulting comments and the like.

8. Avoid using animated images as your avatar. If you animate, keep it stylish and discreet so that your avatar doesn’t irritate readers. You may be asked to change your avatar, or it may be changed for you.

9. Keep signatures at reasonable length. The larger signature area is there to enable users to use html or javascript on their signatures, creating a small interactive signature. Keep the size under 150 pixels high, which is about the hight of your avatar + user name on the side of your message. (Depending on site settings.)

10. When posting images and long links, make sure they do not stretch the site layout out of proportion. If this happens, make the image smaller or use the Link-tool to create a linking word instead of the whole URL. This applies to signatures as well.

11. If a member tries to take or takes advantage of another user, for example agreeing to a trade without holding up to the agreement, his or her access will be limited or denied, depending of the situation.

12. The administrator reserves the right to edit or add to these rules at any time there is need to. New rules will be announced on the board.

13. Any violation against these rules or the spirit of the rules can result into full or partial ban or removal of the account without notice. A person who has received a limited time ban, will be excluded from any post count groups from then on.

Ps: It’s not advisable to edit rules right after someone does something wrong that is not included in the rules, even though I end up doing that all the time – as a lot of times people keep surprising you with the things they do…