With Facebook, Twitter, and now Google Buzz, we’re more and more likely to have social media streams so enormous that it’s physically impossible to read everything our “friends” post. How did it get this way, and how can we regain our sanity?
Walk with me through a brief history of the way social media took over our lives, and how you can take some of that time and attention back:
When Facebook started to get big in 2005, it was still just a way to keep in touch with friends. It didn’t have a News Feed, it didn’t have apps, and hell, it didn’t even have photos! Cut to today, when people are using Facebook as a platform for gaming, for business, and for marketing. There’s only so much time you can spend deleting Farmville invites and looking at pictures of your friends’ babies.
My suggestion? Make Facebook real-life-friends only, and don’t feel bad about hiding particularly spammy friends from your news feed. If you feel you have to use it for business, get a fan page. Search userscripts.org for some of the many ways to hide Facebook ads, sidebars, apps and invitation.
Twitter took off amongst the early-adopter set back at SXSW ’07, and officially became an almost-Facebook-sized part of the national consciousness when Oprah talked about it on her show last year. It was initially a way to meet up with friends and talk about what you ate for lunch, but now normal users are following hundreds of people they don’t know and trying to market their web-based crap to strangers.
If Twitter’s become totally unmanageable, you should either make some tough calls about who to delete — nothing personal, but a good friend doesn’t always make a good twitterer. Split work and personal accounts using one of the many Twitter clients that support multiple accounts and groups (Tweetdeck is one of the most popular). Just because you have 1000 followers doesn’t mean you need to make Twitter useless to you by following all of them back.
Google Buzz
Oh, Buzz … it’s so new that nobody really knows what box to put it in. Thankfully, Google turned off the auto-follow feature, so users now have more control over who they’re reading on Buzz, but you could find yourself oversubscribed … especially because people are feeding their other sites into Buzz.
Don’t do that. Let me decide whether I care enough to follow you on Twitter, Flickr, Reader AND Buzz … don’t make Buzz into a spam-tastic catch-all. You may want to have a talk with any friend who’s clogging up your Gmail account by connecting every social site he can think of to his Buzz. You may also want to decide what place Buzz has in your life: is it just another Twitter? Is it Tumblr? Is it Foursquare?
Of course, this is difficult when Google doesn’t seem to know what Buzz’s purpose is, other than getting Google a piece of your precious attention. And, make no mistake, your attention is precious. If someone is trying to take too much of it on a social site, unsubscribe from them. If keeping up with something like Buzz is causing you more stress than enjoyment, turn it off. It doesn’t have to be personal.
Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He blogs about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to The Morning News, among others. You can also find him on Twitter.
Photo credit – wolfraven
