Social Burn-Out

I knew this moment was coming. The one when you realize that for all the time you spend engaged digitally, fooling yourself into thinking that you can keep up with everything you have joined online, you really can't.

I was looking at Instagram when it happened. One of the guys I follow there, which I follow almost everywhere else as well, said "I suppose I'll start using Instagram more often". To which I replied out of the blue, "Heh, I'm thinking about deleting my Instagram account". You can't really delete Instagram if you're using Facebook, as it's part of Facebook. Unless someone had found a way to do it. I just decided to count how many social networks I AM a part of in one way, shape, or form. I'm sure you're list is similar:

Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter
Google Plus
Foursquare
Amino
Fur Affinity
Tunblr
Deviant Art
Second Life
IMVU
High Fidelity
iBotta
Kik
Facebook Messenger

And a few others that I can't even remember, and maybe have closed up shop and left the internet. I know in a previous blog I said that we all need to get on social networking. But wow, there has to be a point where we just say "enough is enough"!

At my age, I'm throwing in the towel, and admitting that I just can't do it all anymore. Over the next few weeks I'm going to be scaling back. I've already stopped using Foursquare and I'm eliminating my use of Instagram. I gave up on Flickr quite a while back, on the principle that Yahoo was willlingly evil. Even though Verizon owns Yahoo and all its properties now, I still won't return there. And I will be giving up on Tumblr as well. I just can't do them all.

For those of you that follow me on all of these, you're awesome, but I need to consolodate in order to keep my sanity.

The Contextual Web

I learned of an approaching paradigm shift this week: the contextual web.   Normally, I would file this bit of fluff in the back of my head as "that's nice", and forget it about 10 minutes later.  But I decided to do a quick Google for the terms "conceptual internet", and got a link from scobleizer.com.  Normally, I file anything from Robert Scoble in the back of my head in the same manner.  But this time it made me raise my eyebrows.

Mr Scoble is one of those personalities that you either accept anything he does with open arms, ignore anything he does, or keep him at arms length because of the manner he does things.  I've learned to follow him on the odd chance that he will turn up some interesting tidbit of tech, or a stinker I want to stay away from.  Case in point; I watched an NBC Nightly News report where Robert was praising Pinterest.com.  I tweeted that just because Scoble was into Pinterest, I was not going to flock with the masses.  Or something to that effect.

I read his blog, and was thoroughly sold on the contextual web.  It is a concept that absorbs "social networking", "ubiquitous computing", "cloud", and the "semantic web", and attempts to make sense of them all.  We seriously need to pay more attention to this in the upcoming months.  Not years.  Months.

And BTW, I've recently opened a Pinterest account.  I found something there that I'd been looking for for months.  Not because of Robert Scoble.  Because of Google.  But I had to at least acknowledge that Robert was right on this one, too, even if I fought it tooth and nail.

Robot vending machines, again!

I must be ahead of my time. Here's a link from SingularityHub.com about Pepsi Cola's newest social vending machine! Yeah, a social vending machine! Here, I've been ragging about Coca Cola doing this, and Pepsi sneaks up on me and does this. It doesn't talk, per se, but it's a HUGE step in the right direction! At least somebody is listening to me. (I think).