There seems to be a strange obsession at the moment amongst designers with cramming as many social networking doo-dads onto their portfolio site as possible. I’ve always found it a strange marketing strategy to use a portfolio for bombarding potential employers with every aspect of your social life. Personally, I feel it is more prudent to hold back a bit on the plug-ins and feeds. Do you really think your latest Twitter post will reflect favourably on you as a professional? Do you honestly expect someone to hire you based on your top 10 Last.fm tracks?
In putting together the blog section of this site I made a lot of decisions as to how it would be used, who would be reading it, and how it tied in with the rest of the website. I too was tempted by the shiny plug-ins and widgets, but ultimately I decided they were just unnecessary. I even disabled standard Wordpress features like comments (though that was more through a fear that I’d get spammed or worse – get no comments whatsoever!).
I can of course understand why people choose to display all of these seemingly extraneous details alongside their work, many employers like to see that someone is not just a machine for churning out work, and does actually have other interests. At the end of the day though, I think it takes all the fun out of having a web presence if you know that every tweet, every Facebook status update could in some way affect your employability in the future. That, and the fact that somebody could find out about my crack addiction.
