Social sites meta thinkery

[theora]

I've been thinking lately about social networking and the various sites I've been part of. I'm feeling disgruntled and mopey about the whole thing. I know, I know, I never post anyway (though in fact I have been posting pretty frequently on Twitter of late). Nonetheless, I'm going to subject you all to my thoughts on the subject.

Comments

[hatter]

Mostly with you, I know I miss out on things by not reading facebook (I'm there but not easy to find) though I have fb chat in my IM client so I can talk to some of those people not elsewhere. But fb is hateful, broken, and I don't see them ever fixing that.

It'd be handy if everyone I like on lj moved to dw but I think enough people were on lj and faded out as it became bigger, I think the same might happen if dw took off. I also paid for lj to support them, barely used the paid features, just liked the old guard. But they messed up renewing while messing up other stuff, so I've been a free user again for some years now. Can't say I see much of the ads, admittedly, but some of their link rewriting and stuff does seem a bit dubious.

I'm contemplating a separate rss reader for blogs and other stuff that I tend to syndicate into lj currently but (like everything else) I don't feel a need to write much. I like how they tend to be aimed, tending to be about a topic even though they may stray on occasion and give a bit more depth to the writer. Plus they tend to be less frequent than spammy all-about-me writings and less self-referential so not like there's some kind of obligation to catch up after you've missed them for a while. I don't tend to read blog comments, so it doesn't feel a particularly social media though.

Twitter wins in the opposite way, few people who use it expect anyything written to be relevant days or weeks later, it's a frequent and often wide if not deep insight into what people are doing. Plus some people have their blogs fed to tweet about new posts, which I use for some blogs, unlike people who crosspost their fb stuff there which tends to irritate me.

The kids are still down with myspace, as is the music industry, but it is something that people tend to outgrow. I think cam sites and random-chat sites are the social media more widely used by the young ones now though, at least the most visible section of them.

the hatter