http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/technology/personaltech/thinkup-helps-the-social-network-user-see-the-online-self.html 2014-12-31 23:33:08 ThinkUp Helps the Social Network User See the Online Self A service lets a person monitor his or her Facebook or Twitter account, for more awareness of one’s online image. === Anil Dash, a longtime tech entrepreneur and Over the years Mr. Dash has also found himself in the middle of “A lot of it was me dealing with ‘gamergate’ folks,” he said in an interview, referring to this year’s Mr. Dash has been thinking about his behavior on social media for a while. Together with In addition to a list of people’s most-used words and other straightforward stats like follower counts, ThinkUp shows subscribers more unusual information such as how often they thank and congratulate people, how frequently they swear, whose voices they tend to amplify, and which posts get the biggest reaction and from whom. Some of this may sound trivial. But after using ThinkUp for about six months, I’ve found it to be an indispensable guide to how I navigate social networks. Every morning the service delivers an email packed with information, and in its weighty thoroughness, it reminds you that what you do on Twitter and That is the point. “The goal is to make you act like less of a jerk online,” Ms. Trapani said. “The big goal is to create mindfulness and awareness, and also behavioral change.” She pointed out that people often tweet and update without any perspective about themselves. That’s because Facebook and Twitter, as others have observed, have a way of infecting our brains. Because social networks often suggest a false sense of intimacy, they For those of us most deeply afflicted, “There’s a knee-jerk thoughtlessness and lack of empathy that you have because you’re online, because you’re not looking at people’s faces,” Ms. Trapani said. One of the biggest dangers is saying something off the cuff that might make sense in a particular context, but that Being made aware of that — getting a daily reminder from ThinkUp that there are good ways and bad ways to behave online — has a tendency to focus the mind. Thanks to ThinkUp’s nudging, I tend to amplify more people in my feed — that is, I retweet and share insights from people with fewer followers to expose their ideas to the people who follow me. Because ThinkUp alerts me to changes in people’s profiles and reminds me when people are being congratulated, I’ve found myself more plugged in to what people in my network are up to in their lives. More basically, though, it’s helped me pull back from social networks. Each week, ThinkUp tells me how often I’ve tweeted. Sometimes that number is terribly high — a few weeks ago it was more than 800 times — and I realize I’m probably overtaxing my followers, so I pull back the next week. But ThinkUp charges $5 a month for each social network you connect to it. Is it worth it? After all, there’s a better, more surefire way of avoiding any such long-term catastrophe caused by social media: Just stop using social networks. But even though For starters, your online profile plays an important role in how you’re perceived by potential employers. In a recent survey commissioned by the job-hunting site CareerBuilder, almost half of companies said they perused job-seekers’ social-networking profiles to look for red flags and to see what sort of image prospective employees portrayed online. Mr. Dash and Ms. Trapani argue that the future is increasingly social — that most jobs are going to become more connected, and that online image will become more important. Still, ThinkUp has been a hard sell. In the fall of 2013, the company attracted 1,000 users in a crowdfunding campaign, and since then it has signed up a few thousand more. But growth has been slower than the company had hoped for, and this fall it had to That may change as more people falter on social networks, either by posting unthinking comments that end up damaging their careers, or simply by annoying people to the point that their online presence becomes a hindrance to their real-life prospects. After all, Twitter and Facebook don’t come with a built-in guide letting people know how to do well there. Also, most of the third-party tools that give feedback about your presence online — services like “There’s a big base of people who are not a brand or a company, but who care about their image online, and they’re basically not being served by the networks,” Ms. Trapani said. “Anybody who participates in these networks daily or every other day, and who wants to do it well — that’s our audience.”