Daily Dose of Common Sense

As summer draws near, thousands of committees are wrapping up plans for their high school class reunions. Parties, BBQs, bonfires, brunches, and parades will take place to gather classmates that we have forgotten. Or, have we? Facebook has made it easy to reconnect with old school chums. So easy, in fact, there’s almost no need to make a pilgrimage to your reunion in order to find those folks you lost touch with.

Facebook claims it has more than 200 million active users, more than two-thirds of which are outside college. Not only that, the fastest growing demographic is the 35 and over crowd. Chances are, if you’re on Facebook, you’ve already been “friended” by old pals you lost touch with, an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend, people you never talked to in school, and people you hardly remember. And now, thanks to the ever-changing status updates, you know every detail (important and mundane) about what’s going on in their lives.

Some say that a virtual connection isn’t as meaningful as chatting in person. However, airfare is expensive and an internet connection is cheap. (And really, you do most of your Facebooking at work anyway.)

If you still want the intimacy only face-to-face can provide, use your reunion budget to spend time with the friends you’re closest to. Most graduating classes have two to four hundred people. How many of those graduates do you really want to hang out with? Instead, get together with friends and rent a beach house or go to Vegas. You’ll probably have more fun than you would if you were listening to the same old yarns around the reunion punch bowl.

Yesterday, Twitter announced a major change in the way information is exchanged with its users. You will no longer see messages from people you follow if the person they messaging is not in your network. For example, if I follow @Oprah and she sends a message to @userIdontfollow, I won’t see that message in my timeline.

The Twitter-verse is agog over this change, which was previously a user setting preference. Since most Twitterers find other users through those they follow, this will seriously change the way a lot of people use the site. Part of the fun of Twitter is being able to eavesdrop on other conversations, even if you aren’t part of the thread. Doing so leads to the discovery of other voices and opinions, and a widening of our social circle.

Twitter calls this a “small settings update” that corrects a “undesirable and confusing” option. Either they have misjudged the way people interact on the site (unlikely) or perhaps there is another reason to choke off the free-flow of information. Many are suggesting that @replies will become a paid service. (We all know Twitter isn’t making money yet.)

Facebook really upset a lot of their core users in the most recent redesign where they tried to emulate…Twitter. The anti-redesign groups immediately sprang up all over Facebook in protest. The largest, “We Hate The New Facebook, so STOP CHANGING IT!!!” currently has 1,583,220 members. For me, Facebook definitely jumped the shark after the last redesign. My zeal for the site waned and I spend less time there. Too bad Twitter didn’t learn from Facebook’s mistake.

To complain about @replies, go here, or tweet using the hashtag “#fixreplies”.

Some people aren’t content with making only one or two bad decisions at a time. Two Domino’s Pizza employees in North Carolina decided not only to abuse customer food, they also chose to film it. But, they didn’t stop there. They wanted to brag about it so they posted the self-made video to YouTube. Some reports said the video had been watched over a million times before being taken down. One of those viewers alerted Domino’s to the shenanigans, which showed an employee making sandwiches with ingredients that had been in his nose.

This is a PR nightmare for the parent company, who has not only fired the two employees but is also considering legal action against them. The two were also arrested and charged with “distrubiting prohibited food.” Wisely, Domino’s immediately went to the Internet to get apologies out to consumers. They began Twittering (@dpzinfo) and the company president put his own response video on YouTube.

Broadcasting one’s life—whether through video, blogging, tweeting, or other social media—can have a dark side. When you make things public, anyone can see, share, and comment on them. These two employees may have thought it was all hilarious, but honestly…did they think YouTube was their own private video-sharing service?