After joining Google+ and the bloom of its newness aged a little, my whims have once again shifted. This past week in fact, I’ve been feeling a bit reclusive and haven’t really done much in any of the social networks that I’m a member in. Maybe it’s because I’m a little busier than I have been for some time, but I don’t feel like spending much time in the social network environment. They are starting to seem more like time wasters than anything else. Maybe I “don’t know” how to use social networks appropriately (frankly, I’m starting to realize I’m not as social as I use to think I was). Consequently, I decided to ax a few of my accounts and the remaining ones are still in question. The following is what I decided:
Nixed accounts:
Triberr:
I joined this social network for a day and then didn’t see the appeal to it. Number 1, I blog for the fun of it and don’t really see it as a money maker of any kind. It’s just a place for me to jot down my personal thoughts into the ether. If people read them great, if not, that’s fine a well. Triberr seems to be a blogging tool that can mass promote your blog to a bunch more people than you can with your own methods of posting on Twitter and Facebook because it will utilize your “Tribes” followers/friends as well to exponentially broaden your reach. It sounds sort of nice but it also feels a bit like a mass email or fax scheme and I don’t want to spam people about my personal thoughts. So after joining this network for a day I decided to opt out.
Tumblr:
Tumblr is another blogging platform that I joined around a year ago or so. It’s sort of a mix of WordPress and twitter. You can write more than you would on twitter but you can also write less than you feel inclined to on WordPress. I did a few posts on it when I first started but I noticed one thing about tumblr that fell short for me. Unlike WordPress where if you decided to jump to a a self-hosting solution you could easily export your site information from WordPress to your new option. Tumblr doesn’t have that ability. It’s a self-enclosed, walled-garden type of network. Also WordPress just seems faster than Tumblr, when it comes to signing in, posting your entries, etc. So after a year or so of inactivity, I decided to just close this account.
GetGlue:
This is a check-in social network like Foursquare, except you use this to check-in activities. At first, I was a heavy user of this network (via the iPhone app). It felt like a game and I was eager to check-in what shows I was watching, what music/podcasts I was listening to etc. But now it just seems a little silly to me and I could better use that time to actually just enjoy the activity I used to “check-in”. Also, I don’t plan on getting my earned stickers anytime soon (the big incentive for checking-in on GetGlue). I have enough clutter in my home.
StumbleUpon:
I was convinced to rejoin this social network a few months ago by a buddy of mine but once again I stopped using it after a few weeks. It’s a cool network to “discover” sites you would’ve never found on your own by “stumbling” across them based on your interests. It’s a fun time-killer but, as I’ve said already, I don’t have any time to kill. So my account is once again deactivated.
Goodreads:
I guess you can say this was one of the first check-in activity social networks available before GetGlue, except this one focused on reading. I joined this network around 2 years ago or so and I would occasionally login to update my “books read” list and see what books people within my social network have read. It was a cool site to find other books that you might be interested in. It was also a cool place to read personal reviews and submit your own if you want to give your two cents on a given book. However, as I said in an earlier post, I stopped reading for a long period of time and I have visited Goodreads even more seldomly. Plus when I was using GetGlue, I would check-in on that site in lieu of Goodreads. Consequently I deleted this account before I decided to delete GetGlue as well.
ex.fm:
This is a social network that is music based but for whatever reason I never quite figured out how to use it effectively (it didn’t help that I mostly listen to podcasts over music). Consequently I just cut my losses and cancelled this service.
Social Networks left standing:
Even though I haven’t really been doing much in the social network-verse, I still decided to keep Google+, Facebook and Twitter active. Though I myself may not be active in them I still visit them every so often to keep apprise of what’s going on. Facebook is especially good in keeping me updated on what free local comedy shows are happening on any given week. I’m still on the fence with Foursquare. Though the appeal of checking-in has lost its luster, occasionally they offer good deals in the area I’m in. So for now, I’ll keep it on my iPhone but it may not be for long. Time will tell.