Portfolio has an interesting article by Simon Dumenco about Facebook's impact on CEOs. Basically, the main thrust of the piece is a comment by tech CEO Michael Fertick:
“There's almost an inverse relationship between seriousness and how much you participate in social networking."
This really stood out to me, in large part because it so closely echoes a similar theory my college roommate Katie and I formulated circa 2004:
"The length of your Facebook profile is inversely proportional to how cool you are."
Granted, we were looking for prospective dates, rather than business partners or employees. And, of course, it's a complete generalization-- I can think of a number of compelling, descriptive, and well-filled-out Facebook profiles of genuinely cool people I know. But most of the time I feel more comfortable keeping my Facebook profile a bit, well, lower profile.
Maybe it all goes back to the first time I read Walden (to this day, one of my favorite books, although it isn't listed on my Facebook profile as such.) Among many of the highlighted, underlined passages in my nearly 10-year-old copy:
"Society is commonly
too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any
new value for each other... We meet at the post-office,
and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are
in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus
lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for
all important and hearty communications."
Makes you wonder what Thoreau would say about Twitter, no?