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Relationships

There’s a reason they call it social media: it is supposed to support our social lives and bring us closer together. So why do social networks leave so many of us feeling overwhelmed and disconnected?

This page is full of ideas and resources to put the social back in social media. It includes blog posts about tools and strategies for connecting with your sweetheart or friends (kids, parents and other family members get their own family page).

Your time online should increase the amount of love in your life. I hope these strategies and ideas can help.

3 practices that restore the meaning of friendship on Facebook

November 18, 2011

Do you insert audible air quotes when you talk about your Facebook “friends”? If so, it’s time to strip away those air quotes and get serious about your online friends, on Facebook and beyond. That’s part of the commitment to embracing your real online life that I’ll be talking about tomorrow at TEDxVictoria. My TEDx [...]

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Bored by your boyfriend? Try having sex.

November 4, 2011

This is my best effort at scrupulous transcription of a conversation I was fortunate to overhear in the locker room today, between two young women I initially assumed were roommates. I wasn’t sure whether the locker room was covered by a cone of silence, so I checked with the Internets, where I received dispensation to [...]

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6 solutions to the sadness of social media

September 27, 2011
man cries at his computer

Is social media making us sad? On the UK’s Channel 4 News website, Benjamin Cohen is concerned that social media is changing the nature of friendship, and has adjusted his use of social media in response: I’ve stopped sharing as much, full stop….I’m not suggesting that everyone else should do the same, but I’m suggesting [...]

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Why I like to check my email

September 26, 2011

Recently I’ve been trying to follow my friend Leda’s advice on taming the compulsive need to pull my iPhone out any spare moment: the eight seconds in which the grocery clerk is running a price check, the twenty seconds it takes to walk to the bathroom, the thirty-seven seconds between ordering my Americano and receiving [...]

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The 10 best tips on how to write an online dating profile

September 22, 2011

It was inevitable that one of my single friends would get the hint. I go on and on about my fascination with online dating, and how tragic it is that I missed out by getting married before it was really a thing, and how much I would like to learn more about how it all [...]

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Lessons for online dating from offline marriage

September 19, 2011

Readers of this blog know that I am fascinated with online dating, probably the way that women who got married in the 50s were fascinated by the birth control pill. Like the pill, online dating has enabled a revolution in romantic and sexual behaviour, one that those of us who got married in the pre-eHarmony [...]

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Facebook dating: 8 tips for pickup artists (or how to avoid them)

July 20, 2011

The slender brunette in the airport lounge had just ended a cell phone call when a young man with heavily gelled blonde hair sat down next to her. “Do you have Internet on your phone?” he asked. “I’m trying to find out the weather.” “Sorry, I can’t get a connection,” she replied, polite but curt, [...]

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The pajama test: An open letter to my Facebook “friends”

June 9, 2011

A year ago today, this blog post was the turning point in my relationship with Facebook. In my life affair for Twitter I’d pretty much lost sight of how Facebook could possibly be relevant to me. Then I made the decision that Facebook would be my personal space — the space where I connected with [...]

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The 9 secrets of a successful marriage (to a web application like Evernote)

May 2, 2011

On August 2 I will celebrate my third anniversary as an Evernote user. For the past three years I’ve put just about all of my notes into the fifty-odd “notebooks” in my Evernote database, including the “Alex blog 140″ notebook I created to hold my drafts for this series. I use Evernote on my Macbook [...]

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Custom URL shorteners put the poetry back in domain names

April 8, 2011

Looking to create your own custom URL shortener, or running into trouble with YOURLs? Follow my sys admin’s step-by-step directions for running YOURLS on an nginx server in this blog post on how to get (and give) great tech support. A man and a woman sit side-by-side in front of a computer. They are talking [...]

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