I Suck At Social Networks

I recently reactivated my account on Twitter (yet again). I keep hearing how people are better informed because of this network so I decided to try to use it as a newsfeed, like a more real-time version of a rss reader. Of course this only works if I follow just news accounts and other accounts that catch my fancy and not follow people who I would normally follow on say FaceBook. I’m sure there is a more social way to use Twitter but I’ve not found a way to do it (it’s one of the reasons I’ve killed my account so many times). Which brings me to a realization: I suck at social networks.

Then again I’m not really good at socializing to begin with. When I’m not at work socializing with customers or work associates, I’m home doing non-socializing forms of recreation (reading, listening or watching some form of media). At least that has been my main form of recreation for the last year. The only exception to this are the few social casual games I play on my phone thanks to Zynga. I have been going out to comedy shows a lot less and staying home a lot more. I guess I’ve become a bit of a social recluse and I guess I’m ok with that.

It seems I’m more comfortable spending my time escaping into mediums of fiction rather than meeting new people or making more social connections. I only have enough time to just do random status updates and lurk through my various news feeds/timelines/streams to get an idea of what’s going on and then I log out and go on about my day (or at least that’s the only time I’m willing to divulge). Then again, another reason I don’t seem to updated my accounts much is that I don’t do much besides work and then go home. There is only so many times you can post that mundanity.

Oh well, how about you? How do you use your social networks? Do you get more out of Twitter than just a news feed function? Let me know.

Trimming Down My Digital Footprint

As you can tell from my last blog entry, it has been quite a while since I last wrote. Just shy of 2 months by 3-4 days to be exact. It hasn’t really been for a lack of ideas but time. Real life has butted into all my activities and kept me off the inter-webs. My usual routines had to be rearranged or removed altogether.

One of the bad things about working in retail, because I’m always attentive to my surroundings to deal with customers, I have very little time for my my old consumption habits. In fact, instead of having my ears plugged in for 8+ hours like I used to in the past, I just have time to listen on my lunch breaks and during my commutes (this roughly translated to 2+hours/day). This drastic change made me take a long look at what I used to spend time on and wean off what I was willing to sacrifice.

At first I started with daily podcasts. I just don’t have the time to keep up with those. This in turn led me to waiving all talk-podcasts and just stick to story-related ones (i.e. Decoder Ring Theatre, This American Life, etc). My reasoning is that with stories I have a beginning and an end which gives me closure and I can move on to the next thing. With talk podcasts I don’t get that satisfaction. Also, I listen to Audible (I pay for this, I damn well better use it) so story-related podcasts are a good compliment to this service.

This shortened-consumption time has also led me back to music listening. A four minute song takes up less time than a 30 minute podcast; moreover, I don’t listen as closely to music as I listen to podcasts, so if I miss a few lyrics there is little to no guilt about it and I won’t have the inclination to rewind and re-listen. I’ll just continue to go on with my day. Not to mention music gets me moving and I tend to get more done with music than podcasts (again that listening factor is key. Multitasking isn’t something I’m all that good at).

Next on the chopping block was social networks. I was initially enthusiastic about Google+ but after a few weeks my account just remained stagnant. I didn’t really communicate with anyone there so it was just a waste of digital space. Consequently I trashed that account. I haven’t used Foursquare in months. I haven’t been going anywhere besides home and work and checking-in to those places lost it’s novelty quite a while ago so that account was expunged. With little consumption time I also had very little time to log-in to social apps and I realized that I almost rarely used Twitter except to tweet or share a link. I almost never read my timeline anymore. At work I’m always busy and when I’m home I rather be reading my Kindle or watching Netflix so after a little more deliberation Twitter was also removed from my life. This left Facebook. I use Facebook very seldomly. In fact there was a time that I thought Twitter was more useful than Facebook. My how things have changed. As seldom as I use Facebook, one of the main reasons I keep it is because my wife still uses it and the last time I deleted my account (2 times now, I believe) she reprimanded me for making her a Facebook widow. It still has some uses for me. It helps me keep track of birthdays and there are still some events I like to stay informed on.

Lastly, I took a long look at my hobbies. I knew there was no way I was going to stop watching TV and I am really making a concerted effort to read more which left me to ponder the fate of my blog and podcasts. I started the blog strong early this year and really did my best to keep up with the post-a-week pledge. Obviously those efforts were lacking these past two months which is why I rightfully removed my badge from the site, as I can no longer claim to be a weekly blogger. I will try again next year. As for the podcasts, it takes more time to record, edit and post a 30-60 minute episode than it takes to type up a blog entry. It also takes a lot of passion and commitment to keep one going. I took a strong look at myself and realized that my interests in podcasting have been fickle at best. So with that small epiphany, I took down both, “The Julio From NY Show” and “The Mundane Chatter Podcast“.

There you have it. I whittled down my digital footprint down to Facebook and this here blog. The hope of this change is that my creative energies will be more focused and therefore my output will once again be more frequent than every few months.

Not Feeling Socially Inclined At The Moment

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.

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