Sunday, July 1, 2012

Stooping to the level of social networking

Personally, I hate the current social networking obsession. People can no longer live their lives without sharing each and every bowel movement that they experience. I’m not like that. I have no friends, and I like having a sense of privacy in my life. Social networking is not for me… or is it?

I have spent an overwhelming majority of my life hiding who I really am. Part of the reason that I started blogging was to find an outlet for the real me and to show that I’m not just another socially acceptable brain-dead zombie like everybody else. I really am a decent guy if you can get past my tendency to pretend to be someone who only seems like a decent guy. Okay, maybe readers of my blog haven’t had too much experience with the lesser me.

Social networking can give me an insignificant speck more to my online outlet for the real me. I might not have any friends, but that doesn’t mean that nobody can find me. It’s a lot like this blog in a way. I will likely remain an outcast, but at least there is an increased chance that individuality-tolerant individuals can bump into me. This could theoretically help shift me from being the most hated in the multiverse to the second most hated in the multiverse. Of course, I might just be dreaming here. I’m honestly not expecting much.

If anyone loyal to Google reads this, I have some good news. Google Plus is not very popular. While this may not be good in terms of the bigger picture, this is more than enough to sway me from that absolutely horrible Facebook website. After all, the incredibly little that I have seen from Google+ is a lot better than the clumsy website that everybody is forcing us to go to for details. It’s also free of that horrible timeline format.

Of course there are other factors in choosing Google+ over Facebook. For starters, remember that I don’t have any real friends to influence me, but that probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. I believe in choosing based on a product or service’s merits rather than what my peers think. If I had a million genuine friends and every one of them was on Facebook, that likely wouldn’t have influenced my decision. That means that Facebook’s only real draw was not a factor for me.

Other issues involve privacy, security, and ethics. Yes, Google tries to develop these huge profiles of their users that they can use for targeted ads, but Facebook is even worse. They develop these profiles and make them available to third parties. By comparison, Google tends to keep your information inside their company.

The bottom line is that Google+ will be an outlet where I can share things that lack substance for blog posts. I still intend to keep my personal policy of never taking more than one day off without a blog post. Due to the frequency of these posts, I feel that it would be better for people who are interested in them to actually visit my blogs regularly rather than resort to links from Google+. For that reason, most of my blog posts will not be mentioned on Google+. There will be some exceptions, primarily for posts that have more of a sense of urgency than normal. While this blog post doesn’t have much sense of urgency, it has a particular relevance to Google+, so I will be posting a link in the near future.

FYI: My Google+ page can be founded by clicking on my name pretty much anywhere that it shows up in my blogs.

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