[Phoenix-pm] phoenix.pm.org wants to aggregate your reddit, del.icio.us, twitter, LJ, myspace

[Darrin Chandler]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 07:39:58AM -0700, Scott Walters wrote:
> But still, I'm amazed at that.  I honestly thought everyone used
> reddit or del.icio.us or *something*.  Even LiveJournal.  I hear
> so many debates about which blog site to use, the debates hinging
> on the crowds on them, among other things.  My non-geeky friends
> have MySpace or LiveJournal blogs...

<snip>

> Hell, I've probably got a dozen RSS feeds... my sticky notes at 
> ponderer.org/webnotes, Twitter, Flickr (disused), YouTube, 
> LiveJournal (disused), an RSS feed of messages I've tagged 
> in mutt, an RSS feed from a calendaring app I use, feed 
> from the blog thingie I hacked up really quick with Continuity
> at slowass.net:1111, my use.perl.org blog, ...  okay, that's 
> nine, but I'm probably forgetting a few.  So to have them 
> coming out my ears while other people apparently have none 
> is mystifying.

This still fits with my "internet homeless" thoughts. Dozens, no,
hundreds of sites all aiming to be a hangout so that people can connect
with their closest friends? Bah! They offer essentially *nothing* that
we can't do on our own with a simple hosting account. Or just go hang
out with your friends in real life. RSS feeds? Why?  Who would read my
RSS feeds? Everyone has a blog, and most are unread.

> Consider http://twittermap.com/maps?mapstring=phoenix,+az ...
> there are hundreds of Twitter users in Phoenix who have 
> posted recently.  Yet no one in this group users Twitter?
> 
> Are we not geeks?  Are we just working stiffs?
> 
> Do you guys actually avoid technology because you work with it
> all day?  Is this stuff disinteresting because it's computer
> related?

No, I just don't have enough time to social network, constantly ping my
friends, and then blog about it. And if I had more time I'd do something
else instead, like write more code. It's not the geeks who are
cluttering up MySpace, et al; it's the "normal" people. You know, the
ones who are delighted that Twitter gives them a way to let all their
friends know that they are rotflmao watching Scrubs, or whatever.

Don't forget that Donald Knuth (pretty geeky!) chose to eschew email.
Come to think of it, my productivity has never recovered fully since the
days when I first got on CompuServe.

It's not that being connected is bad. It's not. I'm on quite a few
mailing lists, irc, and silc. It eats more of my time than I like, but
it's a price I'm paying to stay in the loop, so to speak. But I'm not
willing to sacrifice more time for things like Twitter, where I can be
interrupted in real time, constantly.

You might as well ask why we're not hanging out at the mall with all the
cool kids. ;-P

-- 
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD User Group  |  MetaBUG
dwchandler at stilyagin.com   |  http://phxbug.org/      |  http://metabug.org/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |  Daemons in the Desert   |  Global BUG Federation