In 2004 I didn’t really “get” what Facebook was supposed to accomplish. As far as I was concerned, it was just a goofy expansion of AOL’s “Personal Profile” mechanism and an alternative to the creepy MySpace (which I STILL would not be on if it weren’t for my music career making it a necessity). Sure, on Facebook you could write on walls and exchange private messages… but wasn’t that what AIM and EMAIL was for?

It wasn’t until Facebook introduced the “My Photos” application that I saw any benefit to the site at all… then, as we liked to say in ’04, “it was on like Donky Kong.”

Dear Webshots:

You’ve been replaced by a hotter, younger digital photo album. It’s not you, it’s me. Actually, that’s a lie. It’s totally you.

Have fun in retirement.

Sincerely,

Derrick

After that, I noticed EVERYBODY (including myself) had an obscene amount of pictures posted of the night before every Saturday and Sunday morning (and sometimes Wednesday mornings… and Friday mornings… but I digress). Within a few months it wasn’t uncommon for the majority of my friends to have hundreds of personal Bud Light endorsements peppered about. After a while, the entire thing turned into a game of oneupmanship.

“Make sure you take your camera out tonight! Let’s take some ridiculous photos for Facebook!”

It went on like that for some time and nobody felt any fear about what went up because – after all – Facebook was only open to those with university e-mail accounts. Then the Residence Hall Coordinators started handing out write-ups (through me, which wasn’t cool but neither was I as an RA!) to residents who chronicled their Brooke Hall pre-game sessions digitally.

“Hmm.. maybe we should be a bit more discrete?”

Pretty soon we heard tales of students getting caught cheating by professors after writing on another student’s wall “Hey! Send me that Excel project for Dr. Wood’s class once you finish it!”

F.

Anyways, in graduate school our professors begged and pleaded with us to take down any and all alcohol related photo; a reasonable request seeing as how we were in the “elite” job market, as they liked to put it. For some of us, that meant 90-95% of our online presence disappeared. After all, we were college students. For others, it wasn’t a big deal. For me, with my “point of pride attitude” I had a hard time taking every single picture.

“I’m not about to act like there is something wrong with going out and grabbing some beers with your friends on a Friday and Saturday night! If they aren’t going to hire me because of a bottle of Guinness, so be it! I don’t want to work there anyways!”

… eventually, on my own terms and at my own speed, I realized that too-much-information really could become detrimental to my professional life at some point. I cleaned out all the photos, I tidied up the text on my profile, and deleted anything remotely controversial.

My profile is now incredibly bland… but hey… I’ve got a good salary, health benefits, and a fridge filled with Sam Adams rather than Bud Light. Life is good and, from the looks of it on Facebook, I am too.

The only point of concern for me is wall posts. I’m not a diabolical person, but I do enjoy a slightly off-base sense of humor, as do most of my friends. They like to joke about my “Irishness” and I like to joke about their “Italianness” (I put both nicely). We crack up in our on merry manner and go about our lives. Seeing as how I have some political aspirations, that could be something comes back to bite me, at which point I’ll probably get defensive, tell people to lighten up, and lose the election.

… or maybe I’ll just change all of my display information to “P.J. McFlufferson.” That’ll fool the gotcha mainstream media.

It might not get this far in the general sector, but it will likely move that way. How many HR folks are already looking through the social media sites for this information; PE Obama just goes a step further in asking for it (which also means you can be fired if they found out you didn’t include anything).

There are two major problems that I see with this type of questioning generally:

1. All of us have skeletons – is someone going to use common sense in the review?

2. There is a period when social media started becoming popular where the pitfalls were even less understood than today. Many of those that were students, say, in 2004 & 2005 are more apt to have embarrassing information online.

Whatever the case, be prepared people. Remember that anything you tweet, blog, or update about online will be there forever and can be found.