Social media personalities

Ever wonder what the social media personalities might look like if you were to describe them as if they were people? I did. Here’s what I came up with.

Facebook is that ditzy girl you remember from high school who couldn’t keep her mouth shut yet somehow, despite knowing how prolific she was with other people’s business, she always got the full scoop. When you post a photo, rest assured that the whole world will see it by this afternoon because friends of friends (of friends of friends, ad infinitum) automatically get to see when their friends like or comment on it. And when you break up with your significant other, you’ll get the chance to be reminded about it every time someone likes or dislikes the fact of the breakup.

Pinterest is your coffee table when you throw a party and leave out all the magazines and photo albums you own for your guests and their +1s to see. It’s glossy, colourful, vapid, and gaudy all at the same time and every time one of your friends likes a photo of yours, you get to see it again and again in your stream for days. It’s all about pictures and short “Ooo” comments and lets your friends know just how bad your taste in hair, shoes, clothes, of jewellery really is.

Twitter is the bus station. There is a lot of chatter going on and there are a few people to whom you listen attentively for about 10 seconds each and can respond if you choose to. Otherwise, it’s just a whole lot of noise. Nevertheless, there’s never a dull moment and you will always get the latest hot news and commentary in sound bites of 140 characters. Mostly, there’s a lot of random nothing commentary from total strangers about stuff you have no interest in.

Google+ is the geek den that you never understood in school. It’s as quiet as the library and there are posters of Albert Einstein on the walls where you might have pictures of Channing Tatum or Scarlett Johansson. There’s tons of computers around, and lots of people saying things with words you need a dictionary to understand. Sometimes, someone will bring the equivalent to their Tesla light bulb model to display in the lobby for a few weeks and everybody stands over it coos for so long that you wonder just how intelligent they really are.

Finally, Linked In is where your parents hang out. It’s got a lot of grown up people doing and talking about things that you neither understand or care about. They say you should hang out there if you want to build a professional network, but you wonder why you would need to build a professional network. Isn’t that what work is for?