According to Forbes.com "when it comes to managing their social media profiles, women, on average, behave more like mature, responsible adults while men act like impulsive adolescents". A new study from Pew Internet & American Life Project polled 2,277 adults for the report, that was titled "Privacy Management on Social Media Sites". When they broke down the results by gender, an interesting pattern appeared. Women are behaving more cautiously than men, and men are feeling the negative consequences of it. The main difference was in the privacy settings. Two-thirds of female users allow only their friends to view their MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook pages, while less than half of all male users do so. 26% of men choose the most public setting for their profiles versus 14% of women. Also, nearly twice as many men than women (15% vs. 8%) regretted something that they had previously posted.
So this causes me to wonder, why are women so much more careful than men? In my own opinion, I do not think that guys go on Facebook or other social media sites as often as girls do. Most, but not all, girls seem to update their status at lease once a day, if not more, while guys seem to only update it every once in a while. Maybe this is why males, according to the survey, are less careful with their privacy settings and what they post than females because they are not on those sites nearly as often as girls are so they do not keep track of their own profiles. All I have to say is that regardless of your gender, you should definitely be keeping track of who can view your pages and what you are posting anyways, or else it could lead to regret or negative consequences.
As most of you may already know, Facebook has launched the new "timeline" profile a while ago. Many people have made the switch over to these new features already, but some are waiting until it becomes mandatory, which is within the next few weeks. The users who have switched over however are unpleased and unimpressed with the new layout that pretty much organizes their photos, videos, and status updates in chronological order. There are also many other features which include the ability to look up past information by year, cover photos, and life events. Many users don't like it specifically because pictures and posts from long ago can now easily show up on their profile, making friends think that they are recent. This can all be changed however by simply editing the settings and what can be viewed by friends on your timeline.
Personally, I am one of the people who are waiting until the last minute and it is mandatory to switch to "timeline". I have seen many of my friends with this new layout and I do not like it one bit. It is very confusing when I try looking on their wall and scrolling through their posts. They are set up in a zig-zag diagonal sort of way and I cannot tell what was posted when. I like the current set-up because it is easy to understand and everyone already knows how to use it. However, one of the things I am sort of excited about is this new cover photo idea. I do have to give Facebook props on this one because how many times have we all wanted to change our profile picture, but couldn't decide between 2 different photos? Or wanted a certain picture as your default, but it was too wide or horizontal? At least with this new feature we will be able to have 2 different pictures if we can't decide and since it is horizontally based it will finally display it in a way that is easily visible, and quite surprisingly very clear. But besides this, I really don't think that this new "timeline" is anything to be excited for and I am dreading the day when I log in to Facebook and it will already be converted for me. I just don't understand: Why is Facebook trying to fix something that isn't broken?
Facebook's 'Timeline' Unpopular with Users
