I'm getting a little frustrated with Social Networking lately.
First, it was Facebook. Ok, sure, I joined, played me some Farmville, got sick of Farmville, Friended everyone and their brother, and their brother's 3rd grade soccer coach. Nifty. But have you been on Facebook lately? For every one legitimate post with someone actually saying something, there are 50 spams of "so-and-so needs a sprolecktant prefactorzizant part for their doofliggityplunk in Dirtville, Help out!" or "so-and-so just made a thousand gold widgets playing Deadliest Fungi Hunt, come join the fun!". People, I don't care. I REALLY DON'T CARE. I'm not going to play any of those games anymore, been there, done that. I understand the point of them; they are silly little things to play that are harmless unless you're pumping real world $$ into them. But just trying to wade through the pages and pages of that to glean out real postings is really annoying as hell.
Then, it was Twitter. At first I thought it was totally stupid. Why would people want to know what I ate for breakfast? Or that I'm having a bowel movement? Or that my dog did something cute today? But as I found more people to connect with, and People Of Interest to add to my feed, it got.. fun. I like getting regular updates on my internet friends, how they're doing, quick pics showing little snapshots into their lives. Sharing bits of my life. It got personal. Even though I haven't met most of these people in real life, I feel a connection to them, and really do care about what's happening in their lives, I worry about them.
Then, it was Blogging. Ok, I admit it, I'm a terrible blogger. I just don't have that much to say on a regular basis, or the stuff I do have to say is nothing I would feel comfortable putting out on the interwebs for The World (or certain peoples) to read. So I update when I can, if I feel I have something interesting to say.
Then, it was Feed Readers. These let you keep track of a bunch of blogs you want to read on a regular basis, by organizing them and keeping all updates til you mark them as read. I use reader.google.com. I have a bunch of blogs that I follow that it dutifully keeps posts archived for me til I can go there and read them all. When I remember to go there and read them all.
Then, it was Google+. Really, Internet? Yes, I get how cool it is to have circles that move, so you can micromanage every person you ever knew into nice little boxes that you can label things like, "Former Coworkers" or "Close Friends" or "People Who Smell Like Soup". But yet ANOTHER place to log in to, to check for updates, and try to keep track of? I have Google+ but honestly I never remember to check it, and have barely added anyone into it. It's just MORE WORK.
I AM SATURATED. I work full-time, and ALL "social networking" sites are blocked from work, so I can either try to use my little Droid phone to read/post updates on all these places during work breaks, or wait til I get home where I have housework, kids, dog, cooking, etc to deal with.
I know I could just NOT read all of these, just let them go for a couple days or however long as I do other stuff. I KNOW. But I'm also a control-freak, and knowledge is power, so just KNOWING what's going on is extremely satisfying to me. If I leave off a couple days then that's that much stuff I have to catch up on. I'm also a geek, so I love being on the cutting edge of new technology or apps or the next "big thing". And, most importantly, these are friends and family, I don't want to miss out on what's happening with them. But, I'm tired. I'm tired of trying to keep track of all this stuff. I wish I had ONE place I could just have everything at a click. Some master interface that would integrate ANY social networking stuff I want to do, that wouldn't be platform proprietary or suck to use.
Anyone found anything that is a MCP for all this stuff? That isn't Apple iCloud?
