Creepster

This past week I was sprucing up my resume so that it is less "my pathetic soul just graduated college, gimme a job, I'll do anything" and more "I am doing things with my life and have a particular, valuable skill set that will be an asset to your business."

It got me thinking about APOC and what my skill set will be when I am done with this program. My simple answer is that, right now, I feel like I am getting a couple good insights here and there but I am not really learning anything that new and exciting. Maybe that is the nature of the first semester of the program? Gaining a common ground with the cohort and then branching out into the heavy stuff. Sometimes I feel like as a group we have gelled and need to start moving faster, but then something will come out of left field and muck it up.

To get away from reflecting on my job hunting worries:

Facebook has rolled out a new feature: People You May Know
I really like this feature. It is a way to activate latent ties you may have with people by the premise of "you have lots of friends in common, maybe you should know each other"

However, there are often times when I look at the list and think, "there is a damn good reason why I am not friends with that person." I often find myself in the situation that all of the people on my list are people that are in the Trojan Marching Band which I was a member of for 4 years as an undergrad at USC. It is a huge organization. In the 4 years I was in it, there were probably 500+ people involved that now find themselves on facebook. So I find myself in the conundrum that a majority of my friends on facebook are people I met through my undergrad extra-curricular activity and they all know each other and all of my latent ties (at least according to facebook) are people I haven't friended in the band. Though it is still expanding my horizons (often to freshman I didn't know existed) I hope that as I expand my real life social circle to include professional contacts I will have more opportunities to activate latent ties and build some bridging social capital.

A second feature that Facebook is set to roll out with is Facebook Chat which is basically an IM client within facebook that you can use to chat with other people that are active on the site. I was discussing the pros and cons of this feature and we've decided that it basically will cramp our facebook stalking styles. When everyone knows how much you are on the site you can and will be labeled accordingly. The creeper factor will come into play. Though I can see a potential for good by having the chat feature like being able to ask someone a quick question instead of sending a private message and getting an answer sometime hours/days later. Also, whenever I create an event I always want input on details (especially taglines and party start times) so chatting it out within facebook could streamline my current process of chatting on AIM and moving back and forth to the facebook site while working on my event invitation.
But when you get right down to it, I don't want people to know I am on Facebook constantly being a voyeur. I know I am a creepster but the rest of you don't need to know.