The other night I was hanging out with some folks, and despite my best attempts at not talking about them, someone wanted to know what I thought about Twitter and Facebook. Meh.
I haven’t quite distilled down the plethora of issues that surround those things, not into pub talk at least. Folks don’t want to bust out their devices to double-check references or read up on what are essentially assertions about privacy, community, people as products, federation, culture or ownership. So I just say I don’t use them, and that I have my own sites, and I like doing it the way I do.
A new pattern has come up lately, and I wonder if it is out of desperation, or if these networks are so ubiquitous that people are dumbing down. They ask me, “If you don’t use Facebook, then what do you do? How do you talk to people?”
My canned response is email, but I realize they won’t catch such a vague joke. I am kinda stumped, because at some point, folks have gotta go out and learn about the world, and I just don’t have enough energy to tutor every dopamine-addled social-update addict I meet in a pub.
An RSS feed that has all of our blogs should replace Twitter/Facebook! It’s so simple. For me, the usefulness of twitter/facebook is to only load one webpage to see what my internet friends are saying about themselves and what memes they’re reading.
I guess I should use Google Reader.
Why don’t I already use an RSS aggregator? I have
I guess the “how do I find you on the internet?” question is the whole point of about.me’s product. “One page, with a really nice picture of me, that has links to all of my everything. And I don’t have to buy a domain or pay hosting fees or learn wordpress. It’s all here.” So that’s why communities are popular. I guess that’s the goal of solanin.net too eh?
solanin is an experiment to see if I can distribute the cost of having a full web stack, so that it is inexpensive both financially and cognitively for a person to participate without having to resort to Facebook. Facebook has definite benefits, but I don’t think it is worth cost. So I am trying to make something that is better.
