synapse collapse

I’ve got a few friends that, once aware of how many different social sites I’ve got accounts on, wonder how on Earth I have time to keep that up and why I bother. This goes for Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google [Talk|Reader|Mail|etc], Tumblr (thank you for reading!) and [especially] Twitter. I’ve never come up with a good response, so I thought I’d try to take a stab at it here.

I want to start by talking about Twitter, because that seems to be the most bewildering of all these sites. Twitter also should serve as a decent case-study that covers most of these other sites.

I can get a little long-winded, as you’ll see. Others have gone on and on about the 140 character limit, but I’ll just mention the most import facet [to me] of that constraint: I really have to think about what I’m going to say if I have to phrase my message in such a small amount of text. (Clearly, I’m not doing that now, but that’s why this is a full-on post and not a stream of tweets.)

I find it a lot easier to stay active with small snippets. I’ve never really kept an active blog for more than a week at a time before I lost interest, until I started feeding my Tumblr with Twitter—automatic content! And that 140-character limit means I have much easier time deciding whether an idea is for Twitter or for Tumblr, in which case I try to organize my thoughts more before putting fingers to keys.

Through Twitter, I’ve met or chatted with more interesting and intelligent folks in the past few weeks than I have in the majority of my other online activity. Especially between the Security Twits and the Twin Cities Social Media Breakfast communities, along with randoms I’ve found humorous or interesting.

More personally, I have a lot of close friends and family scattered throughout the country in about a dozen states, one in South Korea, and one in Venezuela (soon to be Peru). Online activities are no replacement for face-to-face contact, but it’s a connection. If I expand that net to distant friends and acquaintances, I would probably come close to all 50 states and a dozen countries. Now, many of these people don’t even know I have a blog and fewer read it regularly, (I can’t even get Wifey to read this) but I am going to change that, and I need to make sure they can find something enjoyable when they come here. Which leads to my last reason.

Not everyone knows what I do, not only at work, but also at home. I want to be able to share the things that interest me from every facet of my life; that’s the crap that makes us all deeper and more interesting people. And if sharing some of these insights allows you to know me more or sheds light on a previously-unknown common interest, all the better.

Thanks again for reading.