While networking face-to-face always involves a delicate hand on the elbow while shaking of the hands in the final stretch of a beautiful conversation, social networking demands posting, posting and more posting.

Podgnosticast offers this tip on being a cultured and a refined socialite on the FB:

Etiquite Tip #1.0:

"It's not enough just to accept a friend request. Write on their wall the first chance you get!

The Facebook "Wall" and its variants on other social networking platforms like Linkedin is a public form; it's a social network broadcast, that not only brings warm fuzzies to the friend who had wondered before clicking your profile if you'd accept them as a friend with thoughts like, "He loves me. She loves me not," but it also is a quick, easy way to solidify to a whole swath of mutual and be-gazing degrees of separation that bond that you and your new social network buddy have and have had (like way back when Z Cavariccis, trench coats and mullet cuts were in vogue.


Your best and closest friends and family are already in your Facebook or Myspace audience-space. Take a moment for a few sincere words for that laggard to your Rolodex. They will thank you in their heart for being recognized - a hot commodity in prosumer-space, and hopefully their sphere will honor you as a guest as well.

After all, that function in the real world where deals happen has that happy bow-tie of business cards and spilling champagne for a plastic flute, but the social sphere has "The Wall."

The most recent issue of Wired magazine has an article on emerging rules of etiquette in our Web 2.0 environment. While its clear that it's a hot topic and one worthy of continued discussion, there remains something from Old Tech that could underwrite the rules that become applicable to these new avenues of communication.

That is, I spied a sign posted on plywood walls used to enclose a construction site at a busy intersection in Brooklyn. It said, "Lost Dog," and went on to describe in an artful print out, complete with a picture, the dogs breed, its idiosyncrasies and a description of how it went missing. While this is an Old Tech appeal to the neighborhood, whoever compiled the document did something extraordinary: they wrote in Sharpie over their public notice, "We found her. Thanks."

While it might have well been just as good to tear off the print out, there was a very humane sense of good will and completion in being notified that the collective "us" had accomplished the mission of returning this beloved dog to its rightful owner.

Likewise, when it comes to the general ease with which we can add our comments to Web artifacts such as friend's status updates, their blog posts or twitters, or even mainstream media articles, what seems to still be downright alienating from all of this is those statements like, "We found her. Thanks."

That is, a status update is not just completed by the act of being commented on; a text or email message is not sent; a blog post or its comments has not been read; a dropped phone call is not over until, at some level, all of these ways of communicating have been issued an "signal received, end of line."

As such, a rule of thumb added to the Wired article for etiquette in these things is this: make it known when a text has been received with a simple response, add a closing comment to comment threads, find a way to say the tide and true "goodbye" to drop calls; in short, make it known that in cyberspace, you, the originator of the transmission says, "10-4. Over and out."