Tag Archives: social networking

Hello my friends and social networking mavens of the readership; I am here to share the news with you all that today is my 9th Anniversary as a user of Twitter. Please try to hold back all the excitement about this occasion for the time being as I reflect upon my first use of the medium.

The medium was slowly becoming all the rage among a group of friends and in the onset I was unsure on how I would even use it. My first account was the PiercingMetal one and it was initially aimed at all activity that I was involved in for the music review website. Back in 2009 that is all that I was doing in terms of writing. I felt that it was “okay at best” while those aforementioned friends were mavens for it. Below is my very first tweet which as you can see is not really aimed at my music site.

We attended a fan/media listening for The 69 Eyes new CD "Back In Blood" sink your teeth into http://bit.ly/uyLHR

— Piercing Ken (@PiercingKen) June 14, 2009

A few short months after using the “PiercingMetal” account I would create a second account and use the ID “PiercingKen”. It was aimed at being my personal one and for connection with the other online networks that I was using like Foursquare, Yelp and maybe even my personal Facebook. The funny thing about using “Piercing Ken” as an ID for this account was that the blog that bears its name was not even on my mind as a thing to do. That would arrive the following May in 2010. I am amused that the first tweet for that account actually would have been better served on the music account but oh well. This might have been an accident at the time but I don’t remember.

According to my many of my more ardent user friends, I still don’t use Twitter properly. I’ve tweeted with PK over 3K times and with PM over 5K times so I’ve been using it. I’ve promised to use the service a lot more than I have been doing and I have. I guess my doing it wrong means I am not talking to people in it as much as I am sharing posts on the two websites and yeah I admit that is a shortcoming of mine when it comes to this service. Here’s to Year #10 for usage which is I guess the next time that I will bring this up. If you do enjoy what either website is up to, then I encourage you to follow the respective Twitter account so you get the links when they go live. We always post to our Facebook’s Official Pages but they keep changing the dynamic on small businesses so no one sees the content. By the way, clicking either tweet up above will bring you to the account to follow which makes that easier to do. Alright, that is all I have on this topic and now its back to other items. Until we meet again my friends, keep on tweeting…

Follow PiercingKen on Twitter – HERE
Follow PiercingMetal on Twitter – HERE
Official Wikipedia for Twitter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

Features, PiercingKen Says

Piercing Ken & Social Networking: Vero – True Social

February 28, 2018 Piercing Ken Leave a comment

It’s been a pretty long while since I’ve had the chance to discuss a brand-new Social Network and how I might employ it here with you readers but for the last couple of days I’ve been seeing my friends share the details about their now being on a community called “VERO”. My curiosity made me look into it and I’ve culled its overall premise below the logo for those who are on the same page as I am.

“Smarter social – Vero is a social network for anyone who loves anything enough to share it – and wants control over who they share it with. Just like we do in real life.”

As you can see, I even created a profile and am not sure how I will be using it. My main goal was just to lock out my own ID on the thing and with a few friends doing it like I have already mentioned, I figured why not play along. I think the plan will be to allow followers to see what I feel like sharing and only accepting those in my real life world as connections. For the last few months that has been how my personal profile on Facebook has rolled as if I don’t know you at all I am not adding you into my mix. New readers to The Chronicles might not know about this but way back when, I did a series of posts about this kind of stuff on my PiercingMetal website. I did this since so many of these networks were needed to maintain a brand presence and if you are curious about that little bit of social networking history you can click on THIS LINK.

The creation of my Vero account was free but I’ve read that this is only for the first 1,000,000 accounts. It will then move to a paid model and one has to wonder if anyone will jump on board with the need to pay to use it. I remember using NING when it was free and once it became a pay to use item it was vamoose for a lot of us. I’m not sure what will come of this new social network and if it will be a success at all. So far I’ve found it to be a very slow performing app and I don’t like that I only can use it on the mobile devices. Also, I don’t see any means of moderating my account on the PC via the web which I personally find very annoying since I am constantly on the system doing development. If it fails, they have all of our emails and mobile device numbers which will likely be sold off and that sucks because I already get too much junk and cold calls. At the point of this writing I can say that so many social networks have gone by the wayside. Stuff like MySpace though still online, no one uses anymore and others like Orkut, Friendster (the original) and so many more are just gone. I’ve deleted my accounts on MySpace and some others as they didn’t bring PiercingMetal or The Chronicles any traffic. Going forward the social networking summaries will be here on The Chronicles but I think I’ve mentioned that a couple of times already. In the off chance that something is 100% focused on PiercingMetal.com then I might talk about it over there. Only time will tell. Have you tried this app yet? What do you think? Let me know down in the comments section below.

Update 1/5/2019: Hey my friends, so I am updating this original post with some news because effective immediately I have deleted the Vero app from my mobile devices. At the end of the day it wasn’t sending any additional traffic to the two websites or finding any real engagement with new fans of the work I am putting out there. It also came under some high scrutiny and with that I say “buh bye”. I couldn’t delete my overall account because you need to submit a ticket or something if you don’t have it loaded and they can go eff themselves with that process. One should be able to log in to the web interface and terminate ones account if deemed necessary. Be wary of this one, and please let me know if I am wrong and missing something about it. With Google+ ending in the coming months (discussed HERE); I’m hoping that something else good will raise its head to help raise awareness to my mediums. Trusting Facebook alone for that seems to be a fools errand. That’s all I have, ciao for now.

Official Website: https://www.vero.co/
Official Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vero_(app)

Features, Technology

AOL Instant Messenger (“AIM”) Says “Goodbye” (1997-2017)

December 15, 2017 Piercing Ken Leave a comment

Today is the day my friends in the cyber realms, for AOL’s Instant Messenger aka “AIM” is signing off for the final time. It first launched in May of 1997 and was in my opinion was pretty awesome for quite some time. Younger readers might not really remember it since texting and Facebook Messenger seem to rule the world of online chatter nowadays but back in the nineties this was initially all that you had.

Way back in the bygone days, my AOL account was set up with the KMPIERCE1 profile since I could not get KENPIERCE and believe me that was so annoying. Eventually they allowed for longer Screen Names so I was able to secure KENNYPIERCE before another version of me could snag it. In AIM you would organize your real life friends and the online ones into groups that made the most sense for you and I recall having one for musicians, family and even the occasional co-worker. As time went on and other services got into the mix, AIM would have competition from MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and even this thing called ICQ. To use any of these you needed their own software client and all of this was used via a dial-up modem. My how the times have changed.

Eventually software such as Trillian allowed users to load ALL of their respective online profiles into a single client and this was super helpful. You didn’t need four different applications running at the same time and instead could just use the one. I would use Trillian for years to access my AIM buddy list and the rest. Of course, speaking frankly, I haven’t used many of my old screen names for a number of years because those I wanted to “speak” to via the computer I would just email or text if I knew them good enough. With Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat dominating the way that everyone is interacting, there didn’t seem much sense in keeping up with it anymore. MSN Messenger would get replaced by Skype which I NEVER use and Yahoo Messenger is only functional on the web instead of a client and I deleted the ICQ account in total a few months ago during a purge of extraneous online items. I’ve read that your AIM Email address will still function but your Buddy List, Images and Chats will be gone (unless you had the setting enabled to save them for the last option) so hopefully those of you who were still using the service took some action. If you didn’t its ciao ciao.

Closing up I have to say that I did enjoy using AIM for the time that I did. Thanks to some topical chat rooms, I even kept a cabal of online friends who I would have never met in the real world and even so many years later some of them still touch base with me once in awhile which is nice. It feels like forever ago since I heard the dial-up strains to connect and the words “You’ve Got Mail” when there was something in my In-Box but like my Father always says “the only constant is change”. Thanks AOL for giving us AIM and letting us connect to worlds that were not as easy to reach back then. I hope all of the folks on my original Buddy List are well, and should any wish to catch up, I am easily found thanks to the websites. Now its time to click the sign-off icon and say “Goodbye”. Twenty years is a great run for sure.

Official Wiki Entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_(software)

Features, PiercingKen Says

Update: Running Down The Website Social Networks

September 15, 2017 Piercing Ken Leave a comment

Recently, I was reading one of the many other music blogs out there .and they were lining out what social networks they recommend be used by bands that are currently trying to raise awareness about their existence. Let’s face it, there are a ton of groups and this was a great idea to see being done. Truth be told, a website is like a band as well because one must employ the same tools in order to help raise the brand profile and keep up with the Jones’. With that in mind, I felt it was a good time to revisit the whole crop of items being used by “The Chronicles” with a quick summary about it. This is our current main page and its theme with the latest posting. Oh yeah and outside of this image, if you click any of the photos you will be brought to that network.

Since it’s now the BIGGEST of the Social Networks ever, I should start with the Official Facebook Page for “The Chronicles”. Facebook became the Big Kahuna for all things social a few years ago and as result its made NUMEROUS changes to the dynamic. We’ve had an official account for years and its those who “like” it help to keep it flourishing. It’s free to have but unless you pay for advertisements or to “increase reach” of the posts you might as well be invisible. These days those who legitimately support our activities here have reported they never see our posts and its probably based on the two-step methodology of being seen. Fans have to not only “like” said page but also select “see first” when they do so. Otherwise we fall far behind all of those friends who argue politics with everyone else on your feed. I used to let the posts go there automatically upon their go live moment, but have since adopted the method of embedding them one by one so the assorted pages that they might relate to get tagged as well. It’s more work sure but its proven effective. Be sure to check this one out for sure.

social networks, facebook, facebook pages — Official Facebook Page

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