Wednesday, May 20, 2009

ADD and Facebook

OK. Maybe I do have ADD.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave in and activated my Facebook profile. I found most of my college friends and invited them to be my 'friend' on Facebook. I also sent invites to several former coworkers spanning most of my career. I am officially drinking the Kool-Aid.

For several years now I have eschewed Facebook. As an information security professional, I could tell you about the dangers of social networking sites (particularly MySpace ... if I log in there again, kill me, please). However, I have been a Twitter bug for quite some time now. Plus, I knew that many of my friends did the Facebook thing.

Facebook is addictive. Really. Twitter was bad enough. I love Twitter. It's like Haiku of the information age. The challenge is to say something witty in 140 characters or less (I dare you). However, Facebook allows you to easily interact with your gang of friends. You can post pictures. You can comment on other people's posts. You can add links. You can respond to quizes (I don't) and post your top 5 whatevers.

Facebook's interface notifies you when your friends have posted something, or when there's been a comment attached to a friend's post. It's like being at a party and jumping into other people's conversations. Twitter is like standing up on your desk and uttering your opinion to anyone who decided to hang out and listen when they saw you starting to climb up there.

It seems that the more that I use Facebook, the less that I post to my blog. This seems to be true for my friends as well. (Except for Dr Momentum who is prolific in all venues. It must be because he sleeps even less than I do.)

I will not give up my blog. Who knows? Maybe I'll even have something interesting to say from time to time. However, I think I must have ADD. Twitter, and now Facebook, have a great amount of appeal to me. I can keep shallowly in touch with people with very little effort, and often with a high degree of amusement.

Welcome to the short attention span era.

1 comment:

JP Burke said...

When I began Twitter, Maggie complained that my blogging started to go downhill in quality.

She was right, I was posting my insights to Twitter instead of elaborating them on my blog. I actually used to post very short blog posts once in a while when they seemed warranted. I don't anymore. Well, not so much. Those thoughts go to Twitter.

I think I'm starting to find some balance. My quips go to Twitter and I save the blog posts for issues where I really do have more to say.

However, I don't always have more to say!