A good friend and fellow techie, Steve McGurn, has done the unthinkable and declared amnesty on his social networking profiles. I know this will sound insane coming from a WEB2.0 evangelist such as me, but he’s right. The idea of all these networks sounds great. Find old school chums on Facebook, keep up to date with all your mobile pals on Twitter, micro blog on Tumblr, see what other people are looking at with del.icio.us, see your online pals through their Flickr uploads, share with Pownce and then again with Mahalo, aggregate with Jaiku, watch with YouTube and Viddler, and then if you have a few minutes left, you post to your blog. Well that doesn’t leave much time for checking your Google Adsense and Analytics let alone the bank and so on.
It got to the point that my Facebook profile was starting to look like a 12 year old’s MySpace page. Big SHOUT OUT! I don’t want to be a vampire, lesbian, favourite pop signer from the cast of lost. I really don’t care how many doughnuts or raw fish you sling at my head. Truth is that you didn’t create that application yourself, and it really doesn’t tell me anything more about you or what’s going on in your life. Sure a war poke is funny for about five minutes but what the hell is the point of the SuperPoke, MegaPoke, EyePoke? So I did waht Steve has done and stripped down the Facebook profile to some of the essentials. I know it’s harsh, but I am writing and creating some fun stuff on my own Blog and web sites that I really don’t want to spend anytime doing it on any other site again. Programmers always repeat their mantra: “Write once, run forever”. Yet we spend hours and hours repeating ourselves from site to site. That’s one of the great things I love about RSS, you write it once, include the feed on your social networking site and Whammo! It looks like you’ve spent all day keeping Facebook up to date when in reality it just takes care of itself. The big problem is that all this great stuff (content) that you have created gets lost among all of the fortune cookies, places you’ve been and quizzes about movies you didn’t really like anyway.
