Microblogging is such a waste of time
From Leo Laport: Buzz Kill.
It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan.
Thousands of tweets and countless Facebook status updates later, I am also coming to the same conclusion. Updates of life from the last two years have been mostly void. There wasn’t even an easy way to backup my data from Facebook.
Comments
Yes about running your own site — especially when you are thinking about retaining the data for 10+ years. This blog is almost 10 years old, and it can be quite interesting reading through some of the old entries here…
I think I’ve joined most social networks around the place, at a minimum to make sure I can secure my vanity URL in case I ever want to use it for something more substantial.
In that time, I’ve come to the opinion that most of the social networks are just a huge waste of time and I refuse to invest any significant time into any of them if I can’t get my data out of them.
For instance, I think that Google Buzz is a great product with a lot of potential. However, I just can’t bring myself to write anything that takes more than a passing amount of energy into it – simply because I don’t control it. Facebook is massive but instead of blogging through it, which is completely possible – I blog through my site and syndicate it into Facebook using a third party application. That way, I get to keep my content, my photos, my video and so on – friends on Facebook get the heads up about it and can read it in detail on my site.
With that in mind, I write on sites that I control & I know will have longevity; unfortunately everything else for me falls by the wayside of limited energy/commitment.
I stumbled upon this site reading a review you wrote about nearlyfreespeech.net.
I just deleted all the ‘anti-social’ site I’m getting into lately. Now I have a peace of mind, more free time etc.
And yes, I completely agrees with you. Its totally a waste of time. Looking back at a later point in life we come to know that we have spent a lot of time online shouting and yelling things that are later meaningless and no one cares.
Better its wise to spent more time with the family and think about them rather than think about some stranger and his/her status updates (tweets or whatever.. ) who we have met online.
Get real, than live in a fantasy online world is more important.
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Jaseem
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Playground is the personal weblog of Scott Yang, a Chinese-Australian Christian who works as a software developer in Sydney Australia.
I see the guys at Techcrunch also wrote up an article about it.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/22/thnks-fr-th-mmrs/
I’ve loved using posterous and getting back into posting semi regular blog type entries, more substantial than “omg getting a coffee” on Twitter :)
However I’m almost tempted to go back to my own site using WordPress. Even though it’s a pain to always have to update and manage, at least the content is mine and it’s a record and it won’t go anywhere.