I've become a pretty regular user of twitter and Facebook in the last 18 months. According to twitter, I created my account on 24 October 2008 and posted 2075 tweets until midnight 6th July 2010, which is 620 days. That works out at an average of 3.35 tweets a day although I didn't really start using it regularly until February 2009. In the last few months I wouldd say it was closer to 6 tweets a day. Going from that to none at all was a strange experience and gave me some time to think about how social media has impacted on my life. So in the month or so that I swore off social media what was learned? Any great insights? Anything at all, in fact? I did keep notes while I was on my self-imposed sabbatical, so read on.
In the first few days, it was my browsing habits that I noticed the most. While I'd keep track of social media updates during the day, via RSS feeds and email updates, during lunch I check out more content-driven sites (ign, gametrailers, rte, etc) than user-generated content on social media sites. The only reason for this I could think of was that everyone else is at lunch too, so there's less user-generated content to read up on?
Since I was staying away from social media, I soon realised how forcing yourself not to post links to articles, sites, etc makes you realise how often you do it, and how trivial the "share on Facebook" button in firefox/tweet button makes the act of sharing an item with your followers. Since the article doesn't appear in your own news feed on Facebook, it's easy to lose track of how often you actually do share content. As well as that, and to a much larger extent than I had realised, posting something on Facebook, or retweeting, has replaced forwarding jokes, vids, audio clips, etc in email. Think about the last ten forwards you were emailed, and the last ten links you saw in your timeline in Facebook or twitter. Which list has the older first entry? When you're only option is to email out stuff you find interesting, you spend more thought and effort before sending the mail out. Over the course of the month I realsed that you send a link because you think it will interest the recipients, but you tweet/Facebook a link because it interests you.
What I thought was bizarre was that some companies make information available via Facebook and twitter, but is not available on their own sites! For example Phantom FM needed you to be logged in and "like" phantom on Facebook to see the Oxegen track of the day, since I was staying off Facebook, there was simply no way for me to win this. Apart from that, this drives users to Facebook, instead of the company's own site. This can only be counter productive in the long run, Facebook gets more traffic, your site gets none, so you lose advertisers because of low traffic numbers. Facebook is a convenient, easy option for companies to use for competitions, instead of writing up their own competition pages, and including registration, etc, they can just use Facebook connect, and run the whole thing on Facebook's servers. Of course this means that if you don't use Facebook, you can't win.
Using twitter, Facebook, google reader, etc, as new sources bascially provides a central repository for your own customised news source. Without them, you have to go to individual sites to get news. The former takes up your time, whenever a new item is posted at the top of an RSS feed, you stop whatever you're doing to read it, which is a distraction from whatever you were working on, whereas in the latter use your own free time (lunchtime, etc) to browse content driven sites. It still takes up time, but has less of a lasting impact on what you were working on. As well as this, there is much less attention paid to new items in a feed, but when you've taken time to search out an article, it leaves more of a lasting impression on you.
As part of the exile, I removed Facebook and twitter from my browsing history, and deleted the cookies from the cache, so I would have to put effort into logging back into those sites I was avoiding, and removed the echofon pluging from firefox. This had to be repeated on my mobile - Facebook and twitter apps were removed, the shortcuts and cookies were removed from Opera Mobile. Not using those sites made me aware that I use my mobile for browsing more user generated content than content driven sites. But as well as that, I never realised that a lot of the sites I use don't have mobile versions. If content driven sites want to be among the more popular sites accessed from mobile devices, this will obviously be a necessity in future. For now, too many of them think that apps will fill this need, but people will want a simpler transition from desktop browsing to mobile browsing and will find using a mobile browser easier than installing an app. Another consequence of this was that I basically stopped using firefox outside the office, because I much prefer Opera as a browser.
I did still read some twitter feeds during the month, but I never logged into my own account. Something that struck me about "@" replies is that the majority of them are replies to statements made by users. Very few of them are opening statements in a conversation, e.g. @tetsujin1979 Hi, how are you. With that in mind, it might still be some time before twitter does replace SMS. I had thought previously that with the increase in use of twitter to the point of ubiquity, and the addition of unlimited data plans to most mobile contracts, that twitter was a viable replacement for SMS. As for the posts themselves, tweets tend to be what you are thinking about right now, whereas blog posts tend to be the end result of time spent researching a subject. Like this post for example.
As the month progressed, I started to think the difference between Texting/Emailing someone and social networking came down to the difference between asking a person "hi, what are you up to" and telling a crowd of people "hi, this is what I'm doing" and as such using social networking is a much more effective way of tracking who is doing what than mass texting/emailing "what you do this weekend/doing next weekend", but only after it passes a certain level of usage, or adoption. There's no point in posting on Orkut what you are going to do this weekend, nobody is going to read it. Since I did not post any updated, most people were surprised to find out I watched the World Cup Final on the big screen in the Aviva Stadium, and that I was at the opening rubgy game in the same stadium.
Since I had stopped using twitter, I stopped visiting some sites whose feeds I follow (e.g. fourfourtwo.com and limerickleader.ie), but for other sites that I visited regardless of how often their twitter feed was updated (e.g. football365) my browsing habits didn't really change. For this reason, for anyone looking for advice on trimming their number feeds they follow, I would advise you to drop sites you visit regularly. You are going to see the new content when you check the site soon enough.
Since some sites have started using Facebook Connect or Twitter OAuth as authentication mechanisms, logging into those sites automatically logs you into Facebook or twitter. It's convenient, but when you're trying to avoid those sites, it becomes a bit of a pain.
Facebook's birthday reminders are a convenient method to remember birthdays. Unfortunately, I missed Susan and Nichola's birthdays (sorry girls). However, I did email them a few days later when I did remember, and both responded. When a milestone event like this happens, (engagement, birth of a child, birthday, etc) messages can get lost in the clutter, and that's made emails more personal. Similarly, for some reason, I think giving someone your email address is more personal than saying "just search for me on Facebook"
Maybe it's just my friends, but more girls than guys got in contact with me to see if I was ok while I was off the grid. Have to say, I'd be the same. If a guy hears nothing from someone, he assumes everything is fine. If a girl hears nothing, she assumes something is wrong
So that was a month disconnected from the matrix.
Incidentally, the other title choice was "Going off the grid for a month"
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