Kashmir Hill, a Forbes' privacy blogger, recently wrote a blog posting citing a start-up firm, Reppler, that recently commissioned a new survey of 300 hiring types to see how they’re using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Tumblr, MySpace, et. al. to screen candidates: 91% of them are doing social networking screens of job applicants. Yes, 91%!
Within the survey this question was asked...
Have you ever rejected a candidate because of what you saw about them on a social networking website?
Here's a graphic of the responses:
Here's the blog post from Reppler (with a clearer graphic), entitled Managing Your Online Image Across Social Networks.
From The Bad Idea File: A ‘Guess Who’s Going To Be Fired Next’ Contest
'The Office' meets 'Lord of the Flies'
A real-life boss in Illinois has outdone The Office’s Michael Scott. William Ernst, owner of a chain of convenience stores called Q-C Mart, decided to run a “fun” game at his stores last March, sending out a memo to all employees announcing it: “NEW CONTEST – GUESS THE NEXT CASHIER WHO WILL BE FIRED!!!”
Quotes of the Day: Justifying Your Facebook Addiction
“No, I really do use Facebook all day long.”
– Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, responding (in 6 minutes) to someone who suggested that “just as drug dealers don’t use the product they sell,” Zuck was probably not as addicted to his site as the rest of its users. Zuck, though, probably doesn’t spend all his time playing Farmville. Via TruthfulTech/Zdnet.
“I don’t trust people in our industry who don’t use Facebook… It’s the soul of how hundreds of millions of people are really experiencing their first time of participating online.”
– Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup.com in an interview with Chris Dixon on TechCrunch, providing more proof that opting out of using Facebook is increasingly not an option.

How The Past Haunts Us In The Digital Age
We often talk about how our pasts follow us online in a reputational sense. Last year, legal scholar Jeff Rosen took to the NYT Magazine to lament the “end of forgetting” in the age of the Web, and the downside of having embarrassing information archived permanently to be perused by future employers, significant others, and anyone who might type your name into a search engine. Facebook’s new Timeline has me thinking about another non-public aspect of ‘the end of forgetting’: the way we can unexpectedly invoke our emotional histories thanks to the easy mining of our email and social networking accounts.
Almost everyone I have talked to has had this experience. You’re searching your email account with some innocuous phrase — “concert,” “dinner,” “orange juice,” “you’re breaking my heart,” “why did you kill my puppy?” — and you unexpectedly stumble upon a years-old conversation you had with someone. Whether you were at work, on your way out the door, or about to embark on a new project, you’re soon reading back through various email exchanges that capture the heartache, burgeoning love, or terrible agony of the time, and all of the emotions come flooding back. This used to be something you did consciously — making the decision to dig out a box of mementos from the back of your closet, or thumb back through an old journal, or meet with a person from your past for coffee — but now, Gmail may just unexpectedly serve it up to you in a search of your inbox. Our electronic pasts become accordion-like; moments from years earlier can suddenly be mushed up to the present — that can be painful, or wonderful, or thrilling… or all of these things, as it was for a Good writer who went through her four-year history of chat messages with her boyfriend after his death from cancer.
Facebook plans to offer us all a version of this soon, in the form of “Timeline.” (Well, not too soon. Timelines, Inc. has sued the social networking behemoth for trademark infringement. Facebook will be holding back the roll-out of that new feature until it figures out how much it’ll take to pay off Timelines, Inc. clears that legal matter up.) Timeline (assuming it’s still called that after the legal matter is cleared up) will mine your profile for all of the most important moments of your life and surface those to the front page of your profile. Depending on how much you turn to Facebook for the chronicling and journaling of your life, this might unearth some powerful moments you hadn’t expected, or wouldn’t have necessarily wanted, its algorithms to serve up to you.
“It’s a time machine,” wrote Charlie White of Mashable after activating his own Timeline before the official release. continue »







