likes abandoned places, art and artists, books, buildings (preferably old or vernacular), Europe, Greece, history, Italy, Palestine, pirates

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Where I spend my time: 1 Facebook, 2 Google Reader, 3 Flickr

 

Since so many of us, Stumblers and Tumblers, these days find ourselves trying to juggle a range of social networks, I thought I’d write a summary of what I use most, and what appeals about each one. I’ve included Google Reader as well, as it is central to prioritising what lobs in.

In order of time spent:

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Facebook, because of

1 discussions — someone posts a comment, question or link to their wall and their friends chime in quickly and easily with responses
2 news from sources you trust — via friends and pages you subscribe to
3 it’s fast!

but … the sheer quantity of material lobbing in encourages a lot of skimming and not much real reading

Still, I have become totally addicted, and sometimes spend hours just reading back links posted to people’s pages.

Google Reader, because

1 It’s the fastest way to read from a lot of blogs, news sources and any site with RSS options
2 You can click links on any item in your list to go to the source that supplied it (a blog, news site or whatever)
3 You can view what has lobbed in list or detailed form (the latter presents the full item, with pictures)
4 There are options to arrange subscriptions in folders, by topic etc; I depend on them

but reading from an aggregator creates personal distance, since you may be following a lot of friends’ postings but seldom showing up as a visitor to them


Flickr, because of

1 The ability to create personal galleries from others’ photos has given a new appeal to me
2 The search engine is excellent, with a range of options for context searching within names, groups, locations etc
3 I subscribe to dozens of group pools which feature photos by theme, and find a lot of good photographers that way

but you need to know how to sift through the garbage in Flickr to get to the goods

Tumblr

1 It has a huge range of free template designs, and new ones are always being added
2 It is the best choice for visual blogging, as posting is easy and the display can be very impressive
3 There is no sense of policing and yet it is also virtually spam-free

but … there is no interaction and the only feedback you get is that someone “liked” your post or reblogged it



Stumbleupon

1 It’s the fastest method of sharing websites with friends
2 It’s easy to keep in touch with SU friends via toolbar messages
3 Good tagging allows you to find your bookmarked sites and pages again

but any effort put into personal blogs (a word now not even used by SU officially) is unrewarding as SU stopped notifying us of new reviews or comments on our postings.
And SU Mk 4 encourages people to simply thumb sites up rather than stop and examine them, and God forbid, review them.
The latest revamp was unfathomably stupid unless they simply want to collect data and/or work with the money-for-clicks crowd and generate revenue there.



Delicious

1 A sophisticated tool for managing and finding bookmarked sites
2 Its search engine allows fine-tuning in context, date periods, networks etc if you’re using it as a general database.
3 It simply does its job, does it well, and is used mostly without ulterior motives, so you get quality links

but it is strictly a utility, and a social network only in the sense that you can access others’ bookmarks.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~

With apologies to those who continue to despise Facebook, friends I visit less frequently though I may still read (thanks to RSS) and people who are sick of the pics I post on here these days.

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