The Painful Side of Social Webbing

There are so many social network sites these days that it’s almost impossible to keep active on all of them. I have, or have had accounts on just about all of them. But, the list of sites I stay active with is very very short.

Today I logged in to Facebook to find that I had a new friend request. By photo alone, I had no idea who the person was. I followed the link to their profile and it was clear that they only requested to by my friend for the sole purpose of padding their friend count and to eventually send me ads at some point down the line. I spend more time on social network sites doing this than I do actually staying in touch with long distance friends & family members. It’s for this exact reason that I deleted my account on MySpace just last week.

With Facebook, the thing that has the biggest ability to waste your time is the massive amounts of third party applications that are available. Rate movies, rate your friends, movie quotes and surveys, before you know it you’ve spent two hours telling people how much you loved the movie Weekend at Bernie’s. A while back I made a choice to remove any of the apps that are time-sucks and I will ignore all requests from friends to add new ones. If you’re a contact of mine on Facebook and I ignore your request, please don’t be upset. I’m just trying to save my sanity.

I’ve found that I no longer have much interest in keeping up with any of my social network accounts. I’ll keep my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, but it’s VERY unlikely that I’ll join any new ones. I’m much happier using my blog here, my photo blog at slackerphotos.com, my twitter account to let everybody know what I’m up to. I then use netvibes.com to read close to 70 RSS feeds. I also use Twirl to follow a few dozen other people’s tweets (a post on twitter is referred to as a ‘tweet’).

If you haven’t already checked out twitter, I strongly suggest it. I realized something about twitter the other day that has really increased it’s usefulness for me. As you may know, I’ve taken up photography as a hobby recently. While checking out some photos on flickr.com, I found a link to a photographer’s blog. When I checked it out, I saw that he also was active on twitter. I started following his tweets. Then, I checked out the list of people he followed. I went through his list and found 5 or 6 other photographers to start following. Also, when checking out their twitter profiles I found links to their photo blogs. Some of them are absolutely amazing. So I add those to my RSS feed list on Netvibes. Now when these people post a tweet or a blog post with a juicy tip, I’m being spoon-fed information on how to improve as a photographer. I have to say that’s better than any class I could possibly think to enroll in. Not to mention being 100% totally free.

Be careful that your social webbing isn’t eating up all your time and not providing you with any benefits. Don’t forget that your time is valuable.