Alan Kleymeyer

I’ve posted before about my favorite advice columnist on Slate.com.

I want to reproduce a  recent letter which I found very valuable.

Dear Prudence,

I wrote something not so flattering about a co-worker on my Twitter page, and she found out about it after someone on my friend list showed it to an acquaintance of hers. The co-worker went to human resources and complained that I was talking about her on Twitter. Because I tweeted on my own personal time, the only thing H.R. could suggest was to be careful about who my friends are on Twitter. So I deleted friends of friends who know the co-worker. My page is marked “private,” so only the people I have chosen as friends can see my entries. Now the co-worker I talked about has made other co-workers give me the cold shoulder. All these women are over 40 and are acting like 5-year-olds. Can you suggest some options for dealing with such a hostile environment? I love my job. so I don’t want to look for work elsewhere.

—Cold Shoulder

Dear Cold Shoulder,

Your adventure shows that social networking really works. When you throw out a piece of information juicier than what you had for dinner last night, it travels the network in ways you can’t control. I know everyone is now compelled to make visible each passing thought, but you might want to give a passing thought to the purpose of your tweets. Sure, we’ve all had the experience of sending an embarrassing e-mail to the wrong person or finding out an e-mail has unfortunately been forwarded. But when you write an e-mail to one friend, there’s an assumption that it’s not for mass dissemination. Twittering is about spreading your thoughts far and wide. You’ve also just gotten a good lesson in how well privacy settings on social networking sites protect you from yourself. As for your office relationships, let’s agree that both you and the woman you disparaged have behaved in a juvenile fashion. But, as they say on the playground, you started it. So own up to what you did—sit down with you co-worker, and tell her you behaved like a jerk. Say you are truly sorry for your ill-considered, hurtful remark and that you hope she’ll accept your apology. And be glad that given Twitter’s limitations, your disparaging comments were blessedly brief.

—Prudie

I’ve volunteered to help organize our 30th reunion.  We’re starting late and we don’t plan to hire the job out like we did for the 10th & 20th.  I’m confident we can do it ourselves with the technology available to us.  I’ve setup this blog to keep potential attendees informed.  I’ve created a group in Facebook for the LBJ Class of 1980. If you graduated from LBJ Austin in 1980 and are interested in the reunion, bookmark or subscribe to the blog linked above and fill out this form to receive the latest updates:  http://tinyurl.com/lbjclassof80

Today I received a Power Point Presentation from a friend. I uploaded it to Google Docs and published it HERE

Certainly, you can remove a person from your friends list by following one of their links to their home page and scrolling down to the bottom of the left column and clicking “Remove From Friends”; but they could take it personally. There are other things you can do if you simply want to remove their wall posts from your wall feed.

Hover just the the right of a friends post and a menu item will appear that will allow you to hide that friend from your wall feed. The Hide command may only appear in certain browsers. It appeared in IE for me but not FireFox.

An even better method is to create a “Favorites” list and to select it as your feed source or move it to the top of the list of groups. You may have to select “More” at the bottom of your groups in order to be able to drag and drop to reorder each item in the list.