Twitter, Blogging and Facebook.
I’ll be honest, until the recent discussion about the changes that facebook.com had made to the terms of service, I haven’t thought about it since I started using it. I won’t say since I signed up, because I did that initially with no plans to ever use it except to look at some pictures that a friend had posted there of his house.
Later on, a few other friends found me on facebook and so I started to slowly use it. Adding friends from High School that I had long ago lost touch with, even connecting up with someone that I went to gradeschool with! It was all kind of fun and exciting, creating links back to people that I just didn’t have the time or inclination or resources to track down before.
But now, with the changes to fb regarding content, I am unsure if I want to continue using it. As I look back at things I have done on fb, I discover that the main thing that I have been doing is just updating my status, and reading what friends are updating for their status messages. I don’t need fb for that. I have a blog. I also have a twitter account. With those two thoughts in my head, I have been kicking the idea around of either killing off fb entirely, not that they will delete the small amounts of content that I have put up or of just piping my twitter updates to it along with my blog posts and not going to facebook.com at all anymore. But would that be enough?
I know that it is too late to get the genie back into the lamp, I have far too much information on the intarwebs from mailing lists, old websites, et cetera. But I am trying to think more about what I put out there, even if I can’t un-ring the bell.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that I do want to feel connected to people, even if it is in a superficial, in passing kind of way. I am on multiple IM networks, I am on IRC almost any time that I am awake. I check my email with the kind of compulsive habit that I wish I could apply to other parts of my life. And of course I also play World of Warcraft, which has a whole list of other people, blogs and forums that I “connect” with in some way.
After much thinking about it (I started this blog post several hours ago, then went to bed), trying not to be hypocritical or to jump on a somewhat popular bandwagon, I am going to keep my facebook account. I will just be little more careful about what I put on there, and most likely will try to integrate twitter and my blog into my life a little more.
After reading a blog post again that a … well, I can’t say we are friends anymore, it’s been a long long time since we had a meaningful conversation, lets call him a possible new-old friend. Anyway, he posted about using Blog RSS Feed Reader fb application, so I am going to follow his lead and see if it works for me.