Catching up is hard to do

Before I wind up being 3 weeks behind, I made myself sit down and go over the assignments for weeks 5-6.

Week 5

Delicious -- I'd heard of it before from conferences and can definitely see the appeal if you travel a lot or use lots of mobile devices. And the tagging feature that instantly groups your bookmarks looks interesting and would be handy if you have lots of bookmarks. But you do have to take the effort and tag them. Having seen the amount of unorganized bookmarks around here, I wonder how many of their users bother that much?

Technorati -- Seemed like a good way to search blogs, although Google also picks up blogs. However, I do wonder how its search engine operates. I used a topic for my test search that I knew was used in four blogs by a particular blogger, but only two of them showed up. I also thought the design of the site was very busy and distracting.

Week 6

MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I freely admit it -- I don't see the attraction. It seems like they are nothing but chatter, chatter, chatter. When I talk/email my friends, I'm talking to them; I'm not interested in talking to all and sundry. That said, I thought MySpace had a very cluttered design, Facebook was cleaner looking (but required a login, so I didn't see more than the front page), and LinkedIn also had a clean design and was very easy to use.

Since I didn't sign up for any of them (I said before, I don't want to sign up for any service I have no intention of using), I also looked at Meebo.com. Again, it seemed like there was nothing but IM chatter.

I read recently that as people get older, they start gravitating to social networking sites that are specifically geared to their interests, like "MountainClimbingSpace.com" (I made that one up, although I'm sure there's something like that out there.) Maybe we need to look for a social network that's geared to history and join that.

Time in a Bottle

I meant to do the assignment in Week 4 -- honestly, I did. I actually looked at all of the options in 9-14 (opened and looked, but I didn't join anything). Then my job got in the way. :-)

But as I looked at the different sites, I thought that while some of them were kind of interesting (especially livemocha.com), who actually has the time to follow through? Which I guess is my feeling about social networks in general. Don't get me wrong -- I love to talk, share opinions, and discuss issues. I've been doing that on discussion lists for years. But I feel that time has become a very precious commodity for me. I like to choose what I get involved in and I don't have time to join everything.

Is this a sign I'm getting old? I hope not. :-)