I deactivated my Facebook account at the beginning of April with the intent of taking only the month off as a sort of social media break. I also deactivated my Instagram account (it may as well be Facebook Photos). The only account that I kept active was Twitter, but I did my best to ignore it as often as possible. It’s ironic that I feel so loathe to delete the Twitter account altogether, but I also do not want to keep it active. I dislike the feeling of having a random open account just sitting out there on the Internet. It also makes it much easier to fall back into the habit of using it when it is there. So that is what addiction feels like. ;)
I have yet to reactivate my Facebook account as I do not miss it in the slightest. I have, however, reactivated Instagram, but only for the purpose of beta testing for Kidpost. I fully expect to jettison it again soon. I am disappointed that SmugMug is not one of the options for Kidpost, but I understand why. The API and the methods of posting to it are such that it does not exist as a sharing place for its primary function, unlike other sites like Flickr which are meant for sharing first and foremost.
It’s also disappointing that Facebook and Instagram are the only current options to test with on Kidpost. I suppose they are the easiest to interact with and to monitor, but I am so tired of Facebook. It’s stagnant, poorly designed, and a grand waste of everyone’s time. I’m even more disappointed that Dave Winer is actually embracing Facebook and funneling some of his content into it from Fargo. I don’t know if he is just trying to boost readership and engagement, or if he really feels that Facebook is the place to be, but it really reminds me of the old AOL web browser replete with keywords and a walled garden that promotes ignorance. That said, I am really starting to love Fargo and am even posting this to my site from Fargo.
So what’s this talk about Tumblr then? Well, I find myself repulsed by the hashtag, URL-shortened, random online-picture/video storage service laden jumble that is Twitter. While they have made interface improvements, supposed conversations get lost in the mix. My eyes tend to glaze over because picking out the relevant information from a 140 character post (the advent of multi-tweets, long-tweets, etc. have changed this as well). Enter Tumblr.
On Tumblr, there is certainly a fair amount of mess as well with reblogging, copious notes and likes, and multiple quote embedding, but on the whole, it is mostly clean, allows for more than 140 characters worth of commentary, has in-built hosting of images, videos, audio, etc. thereby removing the need for using an external service which may embed properly or may use its own redirect happy URL shortener, and combines the features of a blog, Twitter, and even some aspects of Facebook into one neat, customizable package. Also, they have a nice mobile application. Very nice.
As I tend to only post quotes and links for sharing and remembering on Twitter, and since it appears that Twitter’s tweet history has a time-based display limit, I find that Tumblr is a better place for these items. That’s not entirely true. My own web site is the perfect place for these items, but for the time being, I am not entirely sure I want to keep those items on my primary web site. I already have more external links here than I would prefer in ratio to posts of my own content. Of course, content for the sake of adding content is not good content, so there’s always that. If I have nothing to say, it’s better to say nothing.