Social media

Dear Author talking about Twitter today got me thinking about how I've stopped using it for any kind of interaction. With time so much at a premium for me, I can't afford what it takes me to scroll through and try to keep up with what people are saying, especially since I'm not online constantly. Twitter is great for instant news information, but if you're not there when a conversation actually starts? Forget about trying to keep up.

I've tried. I really have. I loved Twitter so much when I first got over there. Short little soundbites were infinitely easier for me to do than blog posts or Facebook. But the more people I followed, the more I lost. Plus, in the beginning I was monitoring three different accounts (my Vivien one, the Jamie Craig one, and a private one), which made an app a necessity. When I had to switch to Janetter a while ago, everything started going downhill.

It began with the fact that Janetter errors out if you get offline for too long. It requires closing the program and reopening it to get it to work again. It's not hard, but it's annoying, and it launches the snowball that turns into an avalanche of reasons not to bother with Twitter at all.

Like trying to sort through what is actually being said. Yes, I have created lists to try and manage that, but they're still bulky and unwieldy as soon as you have a few hundred people on them. Excluding people completely is pretty pointless to me. Why would I follow them in the first place if I wasn't interested in what they were saying? Yes, I realize it's about reaching a larger audience with reciprocation, but if I'm too busy to spend the time on Twitter or I miss their tweet because it's buried in a thousand others (and that number is conservative, when I wake up in the morning after nine hours of being offline, the number of unread tweets is four figures easily), what's the point?

So since I got back from San Antonio, I've been paying more attention to Facebook instead. So far, it seems to be working out for the better. It's still not ideal, but I'm enjoying myself with it more than I did the first time I tried it out. I don't really take pictures, which makes Instagram pointless, while Tumblr gives me a headache. I'll still post announcements to Twitter, but I don't see the fun happening there anymore for me. Which is a little sad considering how much I adored it.