Why can't we be friends?

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Ron is going to bat with the facebook team.

Ron Kittle is reaching out to me.  How cool! It’s that Ron Kittle, former Chicago White Sox outfielder, MLB All-Star and Rookie of the Year.  He read my blog post about the facebook friends limit so he messaged to say, “I’m at the same stage with FB and I’ll be speaking with them Monday to work out how to carry over to a fan page.  I’ll keep you posted.”

Ron is an all-around great guy.  I can truly understand why far more than 5,000 people would want to be his facebook friend.  He’s been working hard on many fronts since leaving the world of professional baseball.  When Ron isn’t raising money for the Indiana Sports Charities organization, he’s giving motivational speeches, building unique baseball-themed furniture in his workshop or trying to help out a friend like me.

I wound up starting a facebook “fan page” after noting that my ABC7 pal Linda Yu had to do the same.  She’s been urging friends to move over to the other profile.  (Yes, Loo is a big Yu fan!)  I’m still not clear on how to merge the profile page with the fan page.  I wish facebook would just lift the limit.

Hangin' at Sox Park at the start of the MLB season.

Maybe Ron will have some answers for us after his meeting with facebook tomorrow.  What a thoughtful friend he is.  It makes me an even bigger Ron Kittle fan.

One can never have too many friends!

Like many people, I love facebook.  It’s great for connecting and re-connecting with friends, Fox Chicago viewers, former classmates and all sorts of people.  But I have a friendly dilemma.  I currently have 4,933 friends – not as many as many others but enough to start dreading the facebook limit of 5,000.

Morning anchor Jan Jeffcoat put it plainly, “Once you reach the limit, you’re screwed!  You can start a fan page but it’s not the same.”  Indeed, fan pages seem narcissistic and pretentious – and they don’t allow for the same kind of interaction as profile pages.  Other television news friends have told me to just start another facebook account under another name.

When I ran into a facebook executive at an event over the summer, I asked him about the friend limit.  He urged me to start a fan page as I urged him to lift the limit.  He later emailed to say, “Right now we will not allow users to exceed 5k friends. In the future you will be able to move your friends over to your fan page.  Sorry.”

Perhaps that’s why I’m spending more time making friends over on twitter.  While tweets are limited to 140 characters, I can have an unlimited number of friends.  At times, I feel I can use as many as I can get!

Post-newscast Geek Girl

I’ve always loved technology.  Good thing – it’s ever-changing in the TV news biz which combines my love for technology with my love for words.

My appreciation for computers and gizmos stems from my parents.  They seem to be spending their retirement attached to their laptops.  Just recently, my father was among the first to get an iPhone 3Gs.

Both of my brothers are engineers in the computer industry.  My older brother is a systems engineer for a software company and my younger brother works for a company that programs video poker machines.  (Don’t ask. He’s not allowed to talk about the programs.)  I’m the black sheep who went into journalism.

Over the past few years, I’ve helped a lot of my colleagues at Fox Chicago to dive into social media.  There is immeasurable value in using sites like facebook and twitter to interact with viewers.

ad : tech chicago

So maybe it won’t surprise you that I spent my afternoon at a tech conference today.  Some of the country’s savviest internet marketers are here for ad:tech chicago.  At a session called “The Twitter Effect”, we heard from companies leveraging Twitter to drive brand engagement and sales.   It’s enlightening but I’m surprised by how much I already know.

A Geek + A Nerd = 2 Nerds : Cam Balzer of Threadless.com (A super cool company!)

I remark to my pals, “Hey, terms like SEO, ROI and bit.ly don’t phase me anymore!”   Without missing a beat, social media strategist Beth Rosen replies, “You are a geek!  Why are we hanging with you?  Where are the cool people?”