Twitter, LinkedIn, and stuff

I am not the biggest fan of social media that everyone seems to be raving about these days. I use it, but I could live without it. I use it because everyone who runs an online business cannot totally ignore it, but I think that there are better ways to promote your business than via social media, such as writing a blog or writing articles. I have utilized both of those methods for a while with some success.

I have also been using the social sites, such as Facebook or Google Plus and, to be totally honest, I do prefer the latter over the former big time. Still, I post more to Facebook where I have no friends (by choice, more about it later) than to Google Plus where about 20 people have me in their circles and I have a comparable number of them in mine. I think Google Plus attracts better quality people, but I have lost my interest in it, in part because of some recent changes in its layout that I do not find much to my liking. This may still change, but I don't see it coming soon.

I had lost my interest in "friending" anyone via Facebook even sooner. I had only one friend there, who turned out to be a mildly deranged, malicious schmuck, the type of a person that many of us got introduced to only thanks to the power of the Internet. Not surprsingly at all. After all, the Internet gives you access to virtually all the schmucks on planet Earth, so chances that you end up being targeted by one, especially if you run an online business, are virtually 100 percent. In fact, I have had a dubious pleasure of having been exposed to at least two such characters (the other one, a "lady" was mentioned by me in some other article). I did not know much about this Facebook thing back then. In particular, I did not know that allowing a guy you don't know to "befriend" you there may spell a trouble, especially if your idea of friendship with a total stranger is not exactly his idea. This guy wanted more as if he really were my friend. And since he did not get it (not that I promised him) and probably for other reasons that I may only guess at, he started a malicious thread on a forum run by a sleazy, cowardly operator from one oversized state of our glorious Union quite popular for its never-ending efforts to cecede from it (or the threats to this effect). This thread could most fittingly be described as deliberately slanderous. I have yet to respond to it, but I have chosen not to lose my sleep over it and will do it on my own terms when the time is right.

That explains why I now refuse to accept anyone as a Facebook friend, even those I have personally known well for years. Nothing personal, I just don't want to waste my time there and take chances with yet another schmuck. But since some people insisted on making connections with me via LinkedIn, I decided to add them to my connections. These are people who have interacted with me via email and one has even bought something (George IV) from me in the past. If you have a LinkedIn account and would like to connect with me there, feel free to do so. If you ever contacted me by email or happen to be my client, I will add you to my connections. I don't add people I have never interacted with as this is simply like creating fake Facebook friends. I guess quite a few people enjoy this kind of activity on LinkedIn judging by the number of request for connections I have received from total strangers, but I am not one of them. I must say that I don't know much about LinkedIn and I am not very active there (yet, but that may also never change), so keep in mind that I am not likely to interact with you there.

These days, outside this site, I am present mainly on Twitter and Blogger. On the latter I have two major blogs, though I post mostly to one of them. My Twitter timeline can also be pretty busy at times and if it were not enough, I have recently created a personal Twitter account and re-activated an old one, meant mainly for business networking.

I will continue to be active in my main Twitter account where I report on my trading and on my vendor business, and perhaps even more active in my new personal Twitter account.

I use the personal account to post things that I tend to read online and bookmark. One could say that it is yet another way to save things that have attracted my attention. I have more than one way to bookmark web pages; some redundancy may not be a bad idea, it's easier to have access to them and easier to remember what you saved in your bookmarks if you save it more than once. While I do not follow anyone in my main Twitter trading account, I will follow everyone who follows me in my personal account as long as they do not post rubbish (porn, lolcats, etc). My interest are rather broad and include science (especially physics and astronomy, but also psychology and neuroscience, where I am a dilletante), technology, health, nutrition, wellbeing, economy and society, so if you are someone with similar interests you may find my Twitter feed useful and you are most welcome to follow me. I follow only a handful of people there, the most prominent of whom is Frank Wilczek, a physics Nobel laureate and someone I had an occasion to meet at a physics conference about 20 years ago. That was a conference attented by two Nobel laureates and at least three future physics Nobel Prize winners, Professor Wilczek being in the latter category. His last name in Polish means literally "little wolf."

Here are a few Twitter posts of mine in my personal account that may give you a good idea of what you can find in my personal Twitter feed.

If you are a trader or in the trading/investment business, feel free to follow me in my other Twitter business account, the one meant for networking. I will follow you back. However, to keep abreast of the developments in my trading business (and especially to follow my trading results that I post in abundance at times), you may may want to follow me in my main trading Twitter account as well. It is there that I post my trading results, sometimes even for whole weeks at a time.

But since I also plan a forum and have been working on it for a while, I think that once the forum is up and running, it will become my main connection with the rest of the trading world. Stay tuned for that then, and meanwhile feel free to follow me on Twitter where you will definitely be informed about that event (and many others as well) and if you share some of my broad interests feel free to follow me in my personal Twitter account and I will reciprocate that.

Posted on August 27th, 2013.

Last updated on September 3rd, 2013.