DesireIsComplicated

Social Media Isn’t Very Social Sometimes

As someone who’s been on the Internet since the early 90’s, I’ve accumulated numerous usernames and profiles.  As anonymity is (and always has been) a personal preference and important to me, I generally consider an avatar or username to be expendable.  I tend to prefer sites that allow one to change a username anytime one wishes.

The past couple of years – though prior to the recession really coming on hard – seemed to spawn a multitude of web sites and services.  I enjoy beta-testing web sites and software so I jumped on alpha and beta invites like crazy.  Some of these sites, while conceptually good, didn’t possess the human-power to consistently program the concept or eventually dropped the ball on feedback correspondence.  The recession particularly seemed to affect the latter but I refuse to alpha/beta test if you’re not going to talk to me - by talk I mean answer an occasional email BTW - so I had to drop most of the services.  Mixx.com has become pretty bad about returning the occasional feedback and I go back to the private beta so I have to assume they either decided to short-staff or else blow off feedback.  Plurk.com started off pretty cool but the “fun” comes from the conversations that develop between users based on individual plurks.  Think of it as a message board with a bleeding edge GUI. Now picture starting a thread on a message board that no one responds to – sorta boring right?  I have had plurks that  generated over a hundred responses but I’ve had far more that resembled nothing more than one-way tweets.

Which brings me to Twitter.   Twitter as a service has been as stable as a dope fiend.  At one point, I was VERY into Twitter but like with the dope fiend that keeps disappointing, I was forced to detach with love.  My biggest pet peeve is the twitterer – usually someone trying to make money or be “internet famous” - who follows me and then stops following after I follow their tweets.  And thanks to numerous sites out there, I can tell if I’m being reciprocated or not.  Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t expect Biz Stone, Techcrunch or The Onion to follow me but I actually give a damn about their content. Joe SEO or Jane WannaBe Microsoft Evangelist: not so much.

Myspace has the ugliest interface I’ve yet to see and I go back to the days when Geocities was the place to be.  Facebook is the antithesis of anonymity.  ‘Nuff said.

For right now, I’m active on Tumblr (this blog), DeviantArt – http://www.desireiscomplicated.deviantart.com , Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/people/desireiscomplicated and Friendfeed which life streams all my profiles from Netflix to Youtube as well as the occasional comment on the various blogs I follow.