Social Media

There are many forms of social media now and at the rate of it's current growth one can only assume many more will be developed. I remember when friendster was the first one I knew about. Now thinking of or saying friendster is comedic. It's like the club nobody wants to go to anymore, it's "old news," a "has-been," and "dated." I'm going to go on a limb and say friendster was the pioneer of social media and the settlers came after. Pioneers are great, they start something new, but with new also comes executional difficulties that need to be ironed out. This "fixing" creates problems in the roll out, hurting the effort (think of the Health Care reform site roll out). After friendster came the settlers: myspace, facebook, twitter, instagram ect. Sure, there are arguments the creators of these "settler sites" are better at creating the technology than the creators of friendster, I'm sure they learned from friendster though, how could they not?

Social media platforms are becoming better in regards to entertainment value for the user. Friendster wasn't that exciting, it had a silly name, not-so-great interface and problems uploading pictures, which caused users to give up. The newer outlets are easy to use, easily accessible and provide quick entertainment.

I chose to delete my facebook profile because it was taking up too much of my time. Instead of working and trying to be productive, I would find myself looking through all of my friend's photo albums for too long. Additionally, I didn't find the hundreds of status updates from people that interesting -- instead, I found them dull: "just had the best coffee at my corner coffeeshop" -- yawn. Online "friendships" are cold, I would rather call, text, email or even (god forbid) see a real friend in person, than read their empty daily status.

Twitter was entertaining for a short time. The handles of comedians and the news were the best in my opinion. Twitter has the same problem as facebook, tweets from regular people such as "just had the best spa day" or "here's a picture of my lunch" are boring, I hit the delete button on that one too. Instagram and Google+ are social media I currently use. Google+ I'm not able to figure out how to use too well to save my life -- pretty sure you need an M.A. in computers to navigate through it -- so that's not going too well. My Instagram experience is enjoyable so far because everything is quick: uploading photos, viewing photos, posting little messages, commenting on other's photos and general entertainment factor. Because it's quick, it makes it easy to turn to instagram when I'm really bored or just want to zone out from thinking so much. On instagram I'm @tellitsister. 

What's your favorite social media outlet?