It seems I’m not the only person working out there’s more to life than live blogging your every living moment. Since starting my experiment just before Christmas, I’ve noticed a few other key people mentioning and picking up on the quietening down trend.
Lloyd Davis’ recent post “Why I’m not in Seesmic at the moment” sums up a lot of my discontent with Seesmic, although I’ll save my proper rant about it for another day when I’m more angsty.
Jamie Riddell from Cheeze summed up the Scoble vs Facebook fight rather well.
And now this morning I see a Tweet (yes, I still have a sneaky peak now and then) from Alan Patrick saying, “Am amazed at the no. of twitternuts saying they are giving up Facebook….I sense a trend!“. He’s also blogged about it here: Are the mavens deserting Facebook?
I’ve also noticed the way certain people use Twitter is starting to grate me more and more. When I have popped by for a quck peak (which I’ve done probably twice in the last few weeks) there’s been a few people using it as an instant message style product. It really really isn’t. The clue is in the “What are you doing?” question that you’re supposed to answer. Not, “Please discuss something with one person that the other 10-500 people following you will have to “listen” to”.
If your discussion goes over one reply – get on the text, IM, MSN, Yahoo!Chat, email whatever the hell you like but don’t think that anyone else is interested in your conversation with someone about anything. Because honestly: we’re not. This is now an instant cull from anyone I follow. I love hearing what people are up to, but I really hate hearing people jabber on with each other about something I care nothing about. Also, it shows you have no concept of what medium to use for your communications. End of rant.
Other than noticing that in sharp detail, not a lot else has really changed in my social media life. The world carries on regardless, I haven’t lost all my friends overnight, and I’m still getting offers for work. More so, in fact. And I’ve more real time to do real things. Where before I sat spending a good 2 hours a day updating my various social networks, now I spend that 2 hours reading well written news and blogs and making up my own mind about what’s going on.
That’s not to say I don’t miss it. Twitter mostly, but interestingly only a few people on there. I think when I come back I will be culling more and listening more, as opposed to listening to the noise too worried to weed out the boring and spammy Tweeters. I’m just going to make it work for me, and that means only interesting Tweeters only.
Thayer Prime's Blog 
The Value of Twitter
Your point on Twitter is interesting. There are some people that chew up the airwaves all day long but if you can filter these people, there is one heck of a lot of knowledge being pumped through twitter, from links to commentary, requests for debate etc. I have taken the opposite stance with Twitter, I am adding as many people as i can find that I feel will teach me something. My Delicious bookmarking is going crazy keeping up with the new sites I am finding and squirelling away for later.
Facebook Crap
Yes, I use facebook. No, I don’t really like it. For me it’ll suddenly get interesting when it grows up a bit.
I am Fun.
I don’t have a Fun Wall.
Does this mean I’m not Fun?
What’s great about the thing is that everybody seems to be on it. It’s the biggest web 2.0 Bandwagon of the past 12 months, and it makes it easy to catch up with people who you really can’t be arsed to phone up as you know that you only really have “So what are you up to these days?” lined up as a question for them.
Maybe I’m starting to sound a little grumpy, however the truth still stands:
All of that rubbish really winds me up.
When facebook is location aware, giving me real time, up to date and sensible information about what an inner circle of my true friends are up to; then I’m really interested. Until then, I just have to be happy with little steps:
http://blog.davidmcnulty.co.uk/2008/01/facebook-hope.html
selah.