Social Media - your life, as performance art

My wife and I had a conversation last night about social media. She was wondering aloud about how the constant performance brought about by Facebook and Twitter might effect a person, specifically, a younger person. I'm sure there are far smarter people who have broached this subject but as soon as she said it, I realized some behaviors I'd only recently picked up, specifically because of Twitter.I recently retweeted something along the lines of: "Twitter makes you love total strangers while Facebook makes you hate people you actually know". It was a funny, pithy observation but it rang true.  To me, Facebook is a community place where I only accept requests from people I've actually audibly spoken to at least once while Twitter is the grand marketplace of ideas where all are welcome.  And I've realized that I much prefer the latter.  The act of discovery with Twitter, finding other like-minded people via retweets and the like, makes it something I check almost constantly while Facebook has become a place I check in with once, maybe twice a week, if I remember.

I also curate more than one twitter account. @mrjhandel is just me while @handelabra is for the company (and @gameminder as well).  And I realized, after my wife mentioned the idea of the "performance" that I've been subconsciously censoring myself recently on Twitter.  Why would I do this?  Several of my recent follows @mrjhandel have seemed to come from @handelabra and I started to worry that some of my left leaning retweets might turn people away from the business and it is exactly this phenomena my wife was referring to.

Is your social media you - presenting yourself to the world as you are or is it *YOU!* - as you want the world to see and experience you?  My initial foray into twitter was the former.  I was just tweeting away, retweeting whatever deemed repeating.  But then, I started to get people following me that seemed to come from the business side and I started to feel like maybe I needed to "play the part" of a more middle of the road, boring business owner.  Something I failed to consider before this conversation was, maybe those people were actually following me. The me who actually had opinions.  And maybe they like Handelabra because there's actually people behind it that have opinions.  Crazy thought, I know.

But what really bakes my noodle now is - now that I'm aware of this, am I really going to go back to being me, or will being me just be a different kind of performance?

Tonight the part of @mrjhandel will be played by...

GAME.minder 2 spotlight - Social

On monday you learned what's new in general, and yesterday we talked about expansion packs.  It seems you can't go two clicks on the internet these days without tripping over a "like" or a "share" or a "tweet" or a "check-in" so today, let's talk the current buzzword - social.

In GAME.minder 1.2, we introduced the ability to share a game with a friend via email and in GAME.minder 2.0, this is becoming even more powerful.  When you share a game to a friend via email from GAME.minder 2, you get something that looks like this ->

Kinda looks like a RE.minder doesn't it?  What makes it extra cool though is that a single tap on any of those .minders opens GAME.minder and sets the RE.minder for you, with just a single tap!  (The friend you're sending it to has to have GAME.minder 2 for it to work though so make sure everyone you know updates).

Once we had this working in email, we figured we might as well use it elsewhere to and we wouldn't really be talking social if we didn't mention the big 2: twitter and facebook.

If you "like" us on facebook or follow us @GAMEminder, aside from always getting the latest GAME.minder related news, you'll also see new games, as soon as they are added to the system.  And this is where mndr.co comes in.

mndr.co is our new short domain for all things .minder.  When a new game is added, you'll see it posted to the wall and tweeted to the stream with it's own URL.  For instance, when our upcoming game, Presidential Pugilism was added just yesterday, it got the URL: http://mndr.co/g/736.  Tapping that link will bring up the mndr.co page for the game and from there, you can tap a platform (in this case, iOS) to set the .minder.  As GAME.minder 2 isn't in the wild yet, we haven't made those links live yet.  But on Friday, all the switches will be flipped and everything will be workin' like a swiss.... car.

Those links can be retweeted, liked, shared, emailed, you name it. We think mndr.co is really gonna open up how people find new games as friends turn friends onto the next great game.

Well folks, that's about as much as we can tell you.  We're less than 48 hours away from launch and we can't tell you how excited we are to get GAME.minder 2 into your hands.

Don't forget, Handelabra will be at PAX East so if you see one of us milling about (white t-shirts with the Handelabra on them) please say hi!  We'd love to chat, and maybe show you the game we're working on too!

See you this weekend!

\m/