There used to be a time when I was on Facebook a lot. I joined groups, created groups and looked at my people’s stream several times a day. It turns out though, I no longer doing that. Of the 20+ groups I am in I only track happenings in 5, opening them up manually. I would use it more often of course, if Facebook would finally come down and introduce group notifications, but at the moment I see me tuning out completely and more likely missing that respective announcement. No way are they getting more eyeballs this way, alienation factor – or fatigue if you will – is much higher. An example? The Web 2.0 dad’s group I created on Facebook is there, but none of the 50+ members is active. I get more baby content on twitter.
The news stream became somewhat irrelevant once most of the active friends also became part of my twitter network. I see most of their links on twitter, just as I see many of their blog posts on twitter, leading me at times to unsubscribe to the RSS feed. Instead, I begin to subscribe to certain twitter-feeds via RSS, especially of those people living and creating in other time zones.
I experimented with the mobile features for a while. I went through all my twitter contacts and reconfigured the settings until I had about 7 people whose messages were allowed through. Furthermore, I set the “don’t send me messages during” times so that I would not get messages during the work day (me being either on with the FF-tweetbar extension or off. I configured a new profile on my phone so that it would ring should somebody call, but deliver messages silently. Perfect. Until I woke up in the mornings to 90+ messages. So I nixed that. No messages to the cell phone. Still with fring and cellity’s mobile twitter compagnon, I have the option if I need it.
So there you have it. My active network is currently on twitter, that’s it, and I control the contact situation.