I’m an off-and-on user of social media, and honestly, that’s mostly been off for awhile. I’m creeped out by the location-aware-always-on services that have been coming into vogue recently. The trouble is, social networks are just to useful and convenient in this day and age. Working in IT, people assume that I have a presence online, and that I carefully maintain and manage it. One of the easiest ways to look into your presence is to simply google yourself.

This blog (and it’s associated photoblog) sort to the top, thankfully. Then twitter, LinkedIn, flickr and the rest. Oddly, my Google Profile shows up at the bottom of the page, and due to the number of search results returned, people will have to scroll down to see that profile. Either Google doesn’t want to have people think it’s a bully by raising the relevance of it’s own tools, or there simply aren’t a lot of links to my profile in the world. Well, links, along with the rest of the special sauce that Google uses to derive search rankings.

What’s missing, notably, is my Facebook profile. I’ve disabled external searching for it, and I’m happy to see it’s not in the results. I’m not really keen on anyone walking into the conversations I have there (although I always make sure to sanitize what I write, as the internet is forever). If people really want to see what I’m saying there, they can go look.

The other thing that’s missing is FourSquare, or any other location-based social media. I don’t like the idea of telling everyone where I am at all times, although sometimes it can be amusing to use to my own ends. More on that later.