Friday, August 29, 2008

Twitter and Social Networking

Lately, I've been pondering about why I seem to avoid social networking type systems. I only have a facebook account so my wife can link to me, I'm on LinkedIn but don't really "use it", cannot stand MySpace, have difficulty keeping a simple blog on a weekly or even monthly post schedule, and, for the life of me, cannot understand the appeal of Twitter. Hell, I don't even have more than 40 Xbox Live friends, despite the fact that my message box is always full.

I think my dislike of those kinds of things is twofold, both work related. First, much of my professional life is consumed by bungie.net, itself a very social place. Investing time elsewhere is somewhat of a distraction. Its kind of like playing an alt in World of Warcraft - sure, I could roll another character, but that's time I could be playing on my main (a demonology warlock, if you care).

Second, and this goes for twitter and blogging, especially, is that I may think of things to say that are interesting, I just don't think they are interesting for a wide audience. But after a conversation today that involved the difference between "signal," "noise," and "spam" (more on that another time), I realized that I'm probably self censoring too much. If people want to read what I say, it is "signal" to them. Otherwise it is just noise. The important thing is to let others decide.

On that note, I decided to play with Twitter - check the box out on the left column. Thanks to my iPhone and my improved data/text plan, maybe I'll find that fun.

Even if none of you care.