Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Possibly getting burned out on Social Media

I have my facebook page open any time I get on my computer.  Yet, lately I have been finding that I don't even read status updates anymore.  Seems the people I have a small amount of interest in are the ones that post the most frequently and the people I care about the most rarely post.  When it comes to twitter I am following so many celebrities that I often don't catch my friends' tweets.  Then there's Google+ that seemed like the coolest thing on the planet when my friends and I all jumped on board, but it wasn't soon after that I was only seeing posts from the same 3 people and nobody else was on there.  It became a ghost town in the matter of a couple weeks. 

I am faced with wondering... is it time to clean house and downsize my friend lists?  Am I just too lazy to properly organize my networks so I only see who I want to see?  Or have I just become plain bored with social media?  Maybe I only know boring people.  ;)

Okay, I know the last point is not true.  I have plenty of intelligent, interesting, inspiring, and engaging people in my life, so why the boredom?  Even though in the past week or so Facebook has created "lists" which is similar to G+'s "circles" so you can select the group of people that you want to see your statuses, I still feel people are editing themselves as to not reveal too much about themselves online... even to their own friends.  I'm not saying I am any different.  I try to be careful about what I say, how I say it, who I am saying it about, and who can read it.  Which I think is smart since you never know for sure who talks to who and the person you intended it for might not be the only person/people that see it. 

So if everyone is doing this self editing, how can we keep social media interesting?  I do love hearing about what my friends' kids are doing or saying, the latest deals the mom bloggers post, or excitement about an upcoming concert/wedding/event they are attending.  I even enjoy the occasional rant on politics, pop culture, and social issues.  But I am losing the desire to want to check in to Facebook multiple times a day to read about it.

Facebook is still my drug of choice for now mainly because G+ still isn't taking off as much as I had hoped.  With Twitter I thought it was so cool in the beginning to follow a bunch of celebrities and laugh at their silly tweets.  That is, until I realized that celebrities are no more interesting than regular folk.  I unfollowed Alyssa Milano after the third tweet she had regarding what she was making for dinner.  Turns out, I don't care. 

Again, I really thought G+ would be the answer to my prayers, and maybe someday it will be.  I'm a huge fan of anything Google, so I was ecstatic about G+.  The first few weeks were great and there seemed to be a lot of interesting, intelligent dialog going on there.  I was loving it!  Until it all stopped.  Where did everyone go?  Today, Google+ went public and I am still holding out hope that it will take off.  But will it remain interesting and intelligent? 

So the questions are... other people bored with social media as well and what can we do to keep it interesting?

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