Hyper-connectivity

hawn Hamilton wanted to connect with me through Linked In.  And, yes, you read that right.  Somehow the first letter on "Shawn's" name did not show up on the Linked-In note,  inviting me to connect with her.

I'm already connected with her through a newsgroup, but I took the bait and said, "yes." So now I'm linked to Shawn or "hawn" twice. 

In this morning's communique, the service offered other people I know with whom I could link up with if I wanted. I passed on that. 

After doing my connecting with my journalist friend, I heard another email plop into the inbox.  This one was from Plaxo.  

It said I could read the updates on all the folks in my Plaxo network of friends if I so desired.  That email went into the "deleted files" folder.  

Not this morning. I've got enough on my cyber mind.  Of great note is the change that occurred about a month ago with my Facebook mail.  

There's no rhyme or reason to it that I've figured out just yet, cuz I'm just now learning about it.

My epiphany occurred when Annie hadn't responded to a note I sent her on Monday.  That seemed a bit unusual, so I sent her another.

She wrote back and said she had, too, responded through my Facebook mail.  Well, I hadn't seen it cuz up until a month ago virtually every note received, from comment threads to personal mesages,  came to my Outlook email inbox.

Upon going to my Facebook message folder to find Annie's earlier note, I learned that dozens of notes of inquiry, responses, etc. had gone unnoticed by this recipient because they were hidden within threads in the Facebook messages file. 

Over the past few weeks, I had been wondering why "so and so" had never written back (several so-and-so's, in fact).  

It had been a mystery to me why I'd never received two notes written by one of Annie's friends about two-three weeks ago. And, I'm sure it was a mystery to him why I did not respond.

During this discovery, I also noticed that Facebook personal messaging is a bit on the sensitive side.  Hit that "enter" button at the wrong time, and your incomplete note (in one case it was 'Dear Kenda'), goes flying on to its recipient.  

So, as of yesterday, I'm learning to be very careful with the "enter" key. 

Finally, a few days ago, I wrote a note to my friend Janice from Western Pleasure Guest Ranch.  Her response that day made no sense.  

I reread the note I'd written to her to see if I had possibly miscommunicated.  

When I saw no clues of anything that could be misconstrued, I gathered up the nerve to write back and say, "There's a disconnect here." 

Janice wrote back with an appropriate response and told me she'd read the wrong note from me.  Both Janice and I,  in a conversation yesterday,  pieced together a lot of answers to the mysteries that have afflicted our Facebook messaging system.

Turns out that instead of the latest message being on top, it's clear down at the bottom.  And, if you write to a person often, you do a lot of scrolling to find their newest message.

Why did they do that?  When did they do that?  And, why did Facebook not tell us?

In short, in all my connectivities, I've been missing lots of correspondence, and I'm still catching up with the Facebook debacle.  

I've figured out that the Facebook folks think we need to have the same thread for every piece of communication we receive from said person, all stored in one place.  

Makes sense, but the change caught me offguard, and now I'm doing the catch-up.

All these ways to keep in touch with people, and we're still missing the boat half the time.  

The Facebook message change and all the egg I've felt dripping down my face during the last 24 hours for thinking someone was ignoring me or not knowing that someone was not ignoring me but thinking I was ignoring them leads me to believe that "the old-fashioned" method of communication "face to face" may still have a few advantages.  

Nonetheless, I have learned that I need proactive and look for messages that people may have sent to me, and it's vitally important to remember all the receptacles of where they might be residing---Outlook email, Hotmail,  Facebook, Plaxo, Linked in, newsgroups,  comment threads, etc. 

Our hyper-connectivity offers a virtual smorgasboard of information storage spots, and at times, it gets confusing.