Social media have become important to loads of people.
Yesterday, on the last day of 2011, I’ve had coffee with two friends of mine. During our meet-up in a coffee-bar in the centre of Utrecht we had a talk about (the ‘need’ for) social media. We discussed the fact that during my trip to the coffee-bar, I had checked-in on Foursquare three times in total while arriving at two railway stations and when entering the coffee-bar. Was it really useful?
##Foursquare Foursquare has become a habit; it’s in my system to check-in at a venue as soon as I enter. I do it as soon as I enter the office in the morning, whenever I have a short dull moment when going for a drink somewhere, I tend to immediatly check-in. Why? I’m not sure. That’s why I decided to quit and I deinstalled the app on my Android device.
In 2011 I already suspended my Facebook-account. This morning I deleted it. Why? This was mostly because I was (and am) very dissapointed about the fact that the overall mass-adaption of Facebook resulted in specific services to be accessible only when you have a Facebook account (think Spotify for example). This really bothered me.
The second reason for me to delete my account is the fact that Facebook has been fooling around with privacy settings to a point that I found it virtually impossible to maintain control over which person would be able to see my updates. This might be the reason I’m starting to like the idea of Google Plus.
I’ve been on Twitter since April 28th, 2008. The primary use: keep in touch with my collegues at Incentro. The secondary use would be to follow interesting peeps in my line of work. Fun, maybe even useful, but I’m gonna try to find out if it’s really something I need. I’m starting to believe that Twitter is a big distraction; I might be more productive following blogs of peeps in my line of work, instead of following them on Twitter and being redirected to their blogposts anyway.
After my first months of using Twitter, I suspended my personal blog because I felt that Twitter would be replacing it. Now, I’m turning it around. I deleted Tweetdeck from my phone and started writing this blogpost. Actually, this feels more constructive then writing a 160 character message on Twitter.
Let’s see if I’m gonna miss any of the social media described above. I hope not. Oh and just to be clear, you can still find me on the media below: