It’s no secret that I love me some social networking here on this internets thing made up of tubes. I love reaching out to others, sharing common interests with others halfway around the world and meeting new friends in person that we’ve already met digitally. This blog is going on ten years old next month and Earl and I have met some wonderful people via this avenue of conversation along the way. We look forward to meeting many more.
As technology progresses new methods of communications pop up here and there. For example, I used to share all of my photos on Flickr and then build blog entries from their interface to automatically post here. This whole thing used to live on Google’s Blogger platform. Not too long ago (relatively speaking), Twitter popped up and everyone start writing witty one liners and laughing silently in front of their screen, thinking how much they were making others laugh with their snappy tweets. At least I did. Then along came Facebook and you could find out what happened to the guy that you lusted after in high school and share all your secrets with all of your family and friends.
With all these new platforms and the like, my information has become scattered all over the place. Facebook used to have a reliable cross posting platform where their Notes interface sucked up each blog entry on a routine basis and posted it there. It got to where I was getting more comments there than here. Then that went haywire; yesterday a week’s worth of posts shot up at once. I write in a timely manner, so this made me look either very foolish or like I had been stricken with Alzheimer’s.
Now Google+ (G+) has come along and it’s turning out to be quite nice. It’s still in beta (testing) and probably will be for a while so there’s some kinks in their system but for the most part it’s pretty nifty. More importantly to me, it has all sorts of integration that appeals to me- photos (replacing Flickr), location stuff (replacing Foursquare), Hangouts (replacing Skype for video) and then the regular stream stuff, which allows you to be rather lengthy in your missives but still provides the option to still be witty with snappy one-liners. Plus there’s the whole social networking aspect with circles of friends, following people, finding G+ users nearby and the like.
So here’s my problem. I’ve never really liked Facebook and I’ve always been kind of half-assed with the way that I use it. Should I ditch it completely? Twitter is slowly replacing news feeds. I definitely find Twitter to be my “go to” place when I suspect something is going on in the world (i.e. the death of Bin Laden) and to keep a finger on the pulse of what the world is thinking about today. Should I just go with G+? The drawback is that it’s Google, who, in my mind at least, is an advertising company that has some really cool technology. This scares me. Even though I used to write ad copy for a living, I really don’t like advertising at all and will do everything I can to avoid it.
But I really like the integration of G+ and getting rid of that scattered feeling of having my data all over creation with multiple links pointing everyone in 10 different directions.
Such a dilemma in today’s world.
Now, if I could just find a way to get email under control. Someday I’ll have a clean inbox again.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
