Om Malik wrote in this blog about a number of people are turning away from Facebook because it wastes a lot of time (and by implication, does not yield the appropriate return):
We are not using the privacy settings of Facebook, and are too polite to say no to invitations from people who want to friend us. No wonder, the social environment is starting to resemble a crowded nightclub. (You go to clubs to be seen, not talk.) … What we need is something more intimate, more private. It’s not about the number of friends, but it’s about connection.
I wrote a post a few weeks ago on why I’m not buying the Facebook hype. Sure it has an open API, very nice for developers, but now that thousands upon thousands of applications can launch on Facebook, it will, like all portals, suffer from having too much. You will have to wade through endless lists of apps. Another giant time suck.
I took several steps this week to weed out the useless activities that only clogged up my schedule and created stress:
(1) I unsubscribed from more than a dozen mailing lists.
(2) I stopped using Twitter and Jaiku. They were novel and fun in the first week, but extremely annoying in the end. I did not want to twit whenever I was going out running, doing grocery shopping, etc. The people who asked to be my Twitter “friends” would write updates almost every 5 minutes it seemed, so that my Twitter screen would be filled with their useless garbage. Anyone who twits that much is, in my opinion, a TWIT.
(3) I deleted 75% of the RSS feeds on my RSS news reader. 75% of people have nothing important to say to me.
(4) This week, I did not respond to time-wasting emails from people who wanted me to do their work for them. In a number of cases (lazy journalists), I did respond, but gave them a link to the appropriate online resource where they could find the answers themselves.
Deleted my account at Linked In
The boldest move of all was to leave Linked In. Read here about why I left the networking site. It was utterly useless and only a burden (all those people I couldn’t care less about wanting to connect, asking questions and worst of all, wanting me to endorse them).
False sense of guilt is the biggest offender
As Om Malik mentions in his Facebook fatigue post, the reason we accept invitations to be friends with someone on Facebook or other social networking sites, or in my case, to endorse someone on Linked In, is that we feel guilty about turning them down. We don’t want to hurt their feelings. So we do all the things we don’t want to do and waste time and energy. I decided that my time is very precious and that if someone I don’t know wants to waste it, I need not feel guilty about saying no.
A lot of social networking sites today, including Facebook, have privacy filters so we should use them more often. It’s time to put the guilt back where it belongs: on lazy people who want you to do their work for them, pathetic connection hounds who have no friends in real life, people who have no direction or purpose other than to waste their own time, and “noisy” people (those who run around doing ten things at the same time – multitasking – but accomplish absolutely nothing).
We need private networks that are like private clubs
I am sure these exist already, but the time is really ripe for these things to spring out of the ground. Ning, a social networking site, allows you to create a private social network. It’s time to bring out the virtual doorman.
