falklueke.com

When I entered Facebook, some friends were quickly available. Ok, most of them did not apply to the same friendship scheme as my ‘real life friends‘ — the main qualification was: we both used facebook and met before. Those were the days of early adopters.

Now these days are gone. And in my facebook friends list there is a wild mixture of friends, friends and friends.

Some of the early facebook friends have become real ones, too. And some did not. But I did remove only a few. Long time real friends joined facebook later. Some were astonished about my friends there. They had never met them at my birthday parties (I don’t publish my date of birth on social networks, but that’s a totally different story).

Some of my ‘real’ friends feel a little confused or even distorted by my communication with early facebook friends. Sometimes we sound a little too much techie, I was told. And the early facebook friends are laughing about people who obviously don’t see the difference between the inbox/outgoing and the commentary function on status updates or wall posts.

Don’t know yet what a facebook friend is and how to deal with that. Any ideas? I already do have several lists in which I sorted my friends.

Dear readers/subscribers. Some of you might miss updates, most of you won’t even have noticed yet. I never ran this blog on a regular basis, my time schedule never allowed me to do.

With the beginning of february, I joined the german consumer protection federal organisation (verbraucherzentrale bundesverband), where I work as a policy officer on consumer rights in the digital world. A nice project with very nice people and, what I like the most, a still fast developing environment. I joined due to my very personal wish of working more in-depth on several topics I dealt with over the past years (I don’t have to be that angry about print media management not understanding even the basics of the net after 10 yrs anymore).

Thanks for your patience and your appreciation. A new and just started project sometimes needs more hands-on hours than you might expect before. In the end it hopefully will be successful and bring the best for all of you.

No real. Just Social Web vacation. See you (your favorite rss reader will notify you, when I’m back).

For the young department of ZEIT online ZEIT Zuender, I took a look on which european nations are using which Social Networks (The text behind the link is German only, but I think you will understand it anyway). While researching, I stumbled across some sites new to me. The result might be read within minutes - but working on it was quite some work (especially, since you won’t believe that some nations seem not to use any social networks).

Not mentioned in the article, since not in the EU: Одноклассники (to be read: Odnoklassniki, in english “classmate”) from Russia, saying it would have 15 Mio registered users. Russian, too: В Контакте (”in contact”), the first Facebook clone looking even more like the original than 2006 started German StudiVZ.

Not available since a few days is Ekipa.hr (in english something like “Team”), which even though I don’t know croatian seemed to be quite interesting, regarding technical issues.

My virtual desk is aching and so do I. It turns out to be a little bit problematic that days are limited to 24 hours. I don’t feel that well, since I feel that some of the things I do are not of the quality I’d like to see them.

In fact, I’m working on 7 different projects at the same time right now, just one of them to be ending during the next week. I think that’s nothing you should try out yourself, it makes your head burst, sleep less than what’s acceptable.

On the other hand, a lot of what I’m doing right now makes me happy. Things are going in a good direction, some projects I had in mind for a while are most probably going to be realized. Need some vacation soon, anyway. Between articles, concepts, ideas and long lists of lovely stuff, my head gets heavier every day.

Facing a very stressful week, I decided not to use Twitter beginning with monday morning.

I integrated Twitter in my daily life during the last months. It became a powerful and easy-to-use-wherever-you-are communication interface to me, i. e. when using pub trans I usually read and wrote tweets on my mobile phone. So I stopped abruptly with this  behaviour on monday having two major goals: saving some time that I need other non-communicative tasks and the other one was of course to find out, how much influence on my life Twitter already gained.

The first thing worked quite well. Twitter is still a dispensable communication tool. It’s easy to use other devices / interfaces to talk to the people you need to talk to.

The second goal I already miserably failed. Twitter is an attention drawing service. First, I switched off the IM functions. Since then, my Jabber client seems to be dead - compared to the weeks before. Then, I tried not to go on m.twitter.com when waiting for a bus or the subway. In lieu thereof, I read newspapers online sites. And I was pretty bored, since not much happened there when I pressed »reload«.

On tuesday, I saw a scene at the tram I thought to be very funny. I could have told the other passengers of the tram that I think it’s funny. I could have screamed it out. I could have made some real noise. I did not do it.

But I would have done on twitter. I would have told people about it. But this time, I didn’t. Sometimes, I miss Twitter. But not twittering seems to save a lot of time.

I did not switch off email notifications. And during this week, some real new followers appeared. In a short period of mental derangement, I once even clicked on “follow this user”. I was so used to this procedure..

I think I will return to Twitter on Monday. Even though it’s a mess and waste of time. And I will write a follow-up, too.

Yep. You can buy me. Well, my content. A new (german language) blog will be starting in may.

Welcome to falklueke.com, my new and english language blog. Hope we’re going to have some fun and interesting discussions here. The topics I’ll try to cover a bit: media, politics and the web from my german based and biased perspective. If you’d like to learn some more about me - since you went here by accident or Google (which in fact often seems to be the same) - visit the short bio page.

English is not my mother tongue, so please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong or my language appears to be too nebulous. If you’d like to get in touch, please contact me by mail (mail[at symbol]falklueke[dot]com).