I’ve been getting some flak lately for my seemingly excessive usage of Facebook, and it’s getting a little old. You know how much time I spend on Facebook per day?
About 10 minutes. Tops.
That’s spread out over the day, including my iPhone app. It really doesn’t take long to glance at what people are up to. I’ve found that my community of friends (especially those in tech) are a lot quicker at finding relevant news than the mainstream media is. Plus, I like keeping up with friends I don’t normally see a lot of; in the Lindy community where many of us are spread out across the world, it’s a great communication tool.
A lot of what I do content-wise is done through third party apps posting to my Facebook profile, much like FriendFeed does. I write a blog post, it’s on Facebook. It’s pretty easy to ignore things on a feed; you can click on any item’s option and choose “Less about [username]“. Or you can delete me altogether. Pretty simple, and I won’t be heartbroken.
I’m a social networking power user. I’m fascinated by them and how they are moving toward uber-inter-connectivity. Most successful web applications today have the option to, among other things, post or receive a feed from some other app such as Facebook. I’ve done that on this blog to an extent with Google Connect and Disqus.
Many of the things we do in everyday life may end up connected in some way; this guy hooked up his laundry machine to send Twitter updates. I know many people are uncomfortable with this level of intimacy into our personal lives, but our shift to a more voyeuristic society seems to be becoming a more common phenomena. Our children won’t care as much as we do today.
I must admit, I do spend a lot more time reading my Twitter feed than I’d like, but that’s a different story.