People at play

Sign up or Log in… more and more websites are asking you to sign up or log in to see personalized content, even so much as sharing your information across many web sites. (We don’t do that here, too much!)

The big giant is, of course, Facebook which has it’s fingers in hundreds of other websites for friend recommendations and such. It’s a nice feature, without a doubt, because it does keep you connected with your social circle. But unless you know how much sharing of your information you are really doing, you might want to logout or turn off the sharing features until you’re more comfortable with all of this.

We are constantly being barraged with messages to buy things and having these sales pitches customized without your complete consent may not be the best thing in the world (online), don’t you agree? And here’s a tip if you’re searching for a job: do a search for yourself and see what comes up. A future employer will likely do the same thing so you want to see what they’ll find.

You might also want to do a “Super logout” at Facebook, if your page is very personal or has content you particularily wouldn’t want an employer reading about you. The “Super logout” is simply deactivating your account. This does not delete your account and you can re-activate it at a later time, but this technique stops people from seeing anything about you on Facebook which is what you’d want. Click on “Account” and “Account settings” and choose “Deactivate account” and you’re done.

Many online dating services also allow you to put your dating profile into a “hidden” state, which is great if you’ve found a few dates and don’t want to be seen as still looking for more, so one click to hide your profile and another click to be available again.

As far as your online dating profile the amount of information about you made available depends on the service and how they are set up as far as the required information and the optional information is displayed. But just because the question is asked don’t think you absolutely have to provide an answer. Many dating services have an “Ask me later” option for some questions, so feel free to use it as you will.

My headline suggestion for you today is this:
“Please ask me anything, this could be the start of something great!”

Have a great day!