Socially smothered

I have been struggling to keep up with the barrage of friend requests, pokes, messages, and all other manner of social networking-only emails that I can't take action on without going to the site and getting further distracted away from the act of just checking my email. I am absolutely smothered (and out of breath after that last sentence).

Don't get me wrong - I love how the internet has brought people together. I met both my husband and my best friend online, so I can't really complain - not to mention that I am making a career out of being on the internet and am continually making new friends because of it. Meeting new people and connecting is really important to me and to most people - which is how this whole social craziness got started. I just think that maybe we have gone a wee bit overboard.

The first step is admitting you have a problem

Frankly, I am ODing on social networks. I started making a list this morning of all of the social networks that I can remember having signed up for (obviously this doesn't include those I did while sleep walking or while watching an episode of Lost) - I'm sure it isn't a complete list, which tells you something. The only ones I use on a regular basis are twitter, flickr, upcoming, and last.fm; that is 4 out of a list of nearly 30. This also doesn't include sites and forums who, of course, don't have RSS feeds (or full ones, I refuse to subscribe to sites with partials because it goes against my Reader policy) that I get notifications from that I need to go and see that someone responded to my post or whatever the case may be.

I just can't keep up on these sites - by the time I get through the last site, someone has already poked me or friended me on another one. It's aggravating and kills productivity when I sit down to get through my emails.

Living as a recovering socialnetworkaholic

BarCamp time is the best and worst time of the year for me. I love the organization - getting things together and in their place, and then seeing all of the hard work pay off. I meet tons of new people who I have a lot in common with that massage the creative, crazy, tech part of my brain. And then they add me on every social network known to man the very week after. I do want to stay in contact with these people, which is why I provide all of my info on my moo cards that I give out at conferences - my email, phone number, and twitter are my preferred methods of contact.

I think people feel pressured to grow their networks on all of these sites, even if the reason they want to network with an aquaintance (vs a friend) doesn't do anything for them socially/professionally. Why do you add the people on the fringes of your social map to all of your sites? Are you hoping to grow that relationship via the network itself?

The only social network I have found that allows me to get to know people more by using it is twitter. A recent good example of that is my friend, Jason McDowell. He responded to one of my tweets about places that would deliver food in my neighborhood (he is about 6 blocks away from me) and we started talking from there. Now we meet regularly for coworking and I even roped him into Web414. I have quite a few friends who I have met in similar fashion - something that has never happened to me on Facebook or Myspace.

Evaluating your time spent versus your reward for using these services is a key part of freeing yourself from the social network trap. Most of my friends use twitter, it is easy to use (I generally respond via SMS and IM), and I have made the highest quality friends from the service; to me, the reward is much greater than the amount of work I have had to put into it.

A possible cure

These social networks all have their place, but when they are making your life more difficult, it is time to cut and run. For some people that isn't so easy, and I understand that. I, too, have a hard time turning away certain social networking things, especially when it's new and different from everything else out there.

If someone were to develop something that would tumble all the major social networking site's APIs into one app *just* for managing friends and messages, I think this would really help (I'll give you a brownie if you decide to do it). It could be something as simple as an AIR app that you loaded up once a day, allowed you to select all and accept or decline, allow you to block certain things, like facebook apps (dear lord, if I get another Zombie/Vampire/Soccer Mom request I may give up on the internet all together).

Share!

How do you deal with juggling all of your social networking profiles and messages?