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.
