A long while back I declared myself done with Myspace and for good reasons. I even went so far as to state that when I saw others hunched over their keyboards pecking away on Myspace, I found myself repulsed by them. I still feel that way about Myspace, and without quite as much disdain I’m starting to feel that way about Facebook and twitter. I’m quite active on both, however, which makes this a bit of a catch-22. Or rather, am I just the pot calling the kettle black? I don’t know, and I frankly I don’t care. I’m an opinionated SOB and that’s just that. (If you’re repulsed by me it might be for reasons that far exceed my participation in the social web.)

I do find some guilty pleasure in social media participation. It even has some SEO value. That can be detailed by my participation on YouTube where I’ll find videos that I enjoy for one reason or another and mark them as Favorites, or I might post a video, typically something that relates to CitySquares somehow. But you definitely won’t find me on YouTube uploading my friend skateboarding off of his 3rd floor balcony, or of my cat fighting his own shadow. Maybe that sort of thing isn’t my generation – the “me” generation seems to be doing much more of that stuff. I think it’s noise and a waste of time. I try to sift through it all quickly and with my eyes closed.

Facebook is another guilty pleasure. Interestingly enough, the three things I use the most in Facebook are 1) status updates, and I use the twitter app for that; 2) Zombie app/game and that’s mainly because my wife uses it and really has fun with it, so I play along and honestly I just want to be the baddest zombie there is and bite chumps (again, stupid guilty pleasure);  and 3) keeping in touch with some friends. Many of my friends don’t do email very well and some of them don’t do phone well either, but they do Facebook well, so I meet them there and we message each other. I actually find myself more in touch with some of my friends, especially long distance friends, through Facebook more than any other medium in a long time. It’s kind of like the new pen-pal? Oh, I also use Facebook for the CitySquares Page. We use it to upload pictures, events, videos, and other random updates and also our blog gets fed to the CitySquares Page. I like to see us rack up more fans of CitySquares, especially total strangers – that’s cool!

twitter is just a phenomenon isn’t it? Who can really articulate what the hell twitter is all about. OK OK yeah I get micro-blogging, and I get character-limited streams of consciousness from a community of like-minded people. Sure, fine. But I equate it to sitting in a room with a bunch of people I hardly know, with a few friends, who are all just blurting out whatever stupid thing comes across their mind. Hey, I’m no exception. Twitter is probably the loneliest social media there is. I’d be willing to bet that twitter users mostly tweet when a) they’re alone and wish someone was there with them to talk to (loneliness – a human thing) or b) when they’re bored and in bad company. And that’s twitter. Yet I use it. Cuz it’s so easy, so available. It’s on my iPhone and it’s on my Mac.

I love Flickr, on the other hand. Love flickr a lot, and I think it’s because unlike Facebook or twitter, it’s totally passive content. I use Flickr to share pictures with the world, or with just my friends, or just my family. I can put them up there and if/when they want to look, they can. I don’t care much more than that. I like the web 2.0 components there like tagging etc, and sure comments are nice. I also like how easy it is to use Flickr through the uploadr, and certainly the site is powerful and more intuitive the more you use it. YouTube is in a similar category.

There are a few others I use too, like ma.gnolia, or LinkedIn, or Last.fm (which I am still not quite sure of) but I think I’ve made my point. Actually, maybe not…

Here’s the thing: I found myself so distracted by this stuff in the recent weeks that I was becoming more and more afflicted with a self-induced Attention Deficit Disorder. And even though it wasn’t because of my own content publishing, it was simply because it was there and I just had to watch. Again, like a drunk at a bar fight, or like watching a car accident, or like a fly to a light, I was drowning in it. So I hinted at taking a sabbatical. Well, that was too extreme. I don’t need a methadone clinic, I just need to do less dope! Well that’s one way of looking at it right? So I took a break last week – a total break. I didn’t tweet, I didn’t login to Facebook, I didn’t do anything that related to social media. I even instant messages less. I used less email, more phone, and I didn’t even cheat once. I just stayed away from it. For the first day or two it was hard, and then was a piece of cake. I could totally do without it! And last week was just down-right productive! It was me doing what I do best – getting shit done, knockin’ em down.

The lesson here is that in a society where there’s already far too much noise, be it TV, be it advertising, the city, those flourescent lights above your desk, be it your family, be it your own neurosys, there’s just too much noise already. Social media is just one more awkward minor chord in the symphony of day-to-day life that I, for one, can do with less of.

A couple of weeks ago we had some fraudulent credit card activity and we had to kill that card and get a new one (I’m still looking for the bastard who thought he could slip one past me). So naturally we had to tell a bunch of vendors about our new card number. I forgot about Facebook. So today I got an email from them, apparently I owe them a whopping $1.92 but they can’t hit our card. The email included:

Subject: Facebook Ads Alert: Payment Failure

Body:

Dear Ben:

We were unable to charge the credit card associated with your Facebook Ads account. This can happen for a number of reasons, including:

* The credit card on file has expired.

* The credit card on file was declined.

Your account is still active, but we have suspended delivery of your ads until you update your payment information. Once we are able to process your payment successfully, we will reactivate your ads.

To update your payment information:

1. Log into your Facebook Ads account at ….

OK Zuck, I’ll get right on it!

I logged in, was conveniently directed to the right page with a credit card payment form. Using the convenience Google toolbar Fill In button I filled in the usual info then I punched in my credit card info. I clicked Submit and waited. And then I waited some more. I then got an error. Something like:

We’re sorry for the inconvenience. Please try again later.

Wait a second, you went through all this trouble to ask me for $1.92 and yet the very functionality to take my payment isnt working? Nice.

And you’re valued at $15 billion?

And you supposedly made $150M in 2007?

OK OK, fine, whatever. Let me find my way back to the Ads pages so I can pay you. Wait – how does one edit their credit card info? That’s another story.

Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m just tired of Facebook, and all the hype. But a $15B valuation? $150M in revenue? For what? Eyeballs? Where’s this money coming from? I don’t know, but it sure ain’t from my $1.92 cuz they won’t take my money today.

Facebook: If you want me to pay you some money, make damn sure that feature works first! Don’t waste my time cuz I’m already getting a little fed up. I just pictured Zucks soft, smart assed little face on 60 minutes as I punched in my credit card digits. It made me want to just stop all together. But no, I went back and tried again, and it worked, and suddenly I felt like good things were going to happen. Ah, Facebook. How I love you.

Maybe I should’ve just saved that money for, I don’t know, a half a gallon of gasoline?

When I first started using MySpace I was totally reluctant. At that time my coworkers were using it heavily, and a couple of my friends and family were also active in it, but I joined, reluctantly, to be a part of the party. I had been

in MySpace prior to totally committing and I found it, frankly, just plain boring. I just didn’t get-it. Then again, I wasn’t a teenager either. I found the technology just and UI to be insulting to me and to society at large, and the users were more annoying to me then a bunch of drunk teenagers at a suburban mall. Every time I saw one of my friends or colleagues huddled over his/her keyboard, pecking away inside MySpace, I thought less of them – no really, I did. I love my friends and my family, but MySpace always seemed to pathetic to me, and so did it’s most active users. A couple of my friends blog in their MySpace profiles and talk about what they ate, who they dated last night, how sad or happy they are. Gimme a break!

Look, I’m really not passing judgment on anyone who uses MySpace, especially my friends and family. I’m not! It just isn’t for me. Never was.

Recently I’ve been getting more and more spam to my gmail account, from supposed MySpace users who “want to be my friend.” It’s totally out of hand. Every time I login to MySpace (once a month) to delete the Friend Invitations, it seems to trigger a flood of spam. Literally within 2 minutes of logging into my MySpace account (which in and of itself is sometimes impossible to do) I am flooded with spam from users like “Nikita” or “Samantha” or “Abigail” who “want to be my friend.”

Back about 2 years ago when Facebook was starting to make more of a name for itself, and some where poo-pooing it for any number of reasons, I wasn’t able to join, because I never had a .edu account. I actually held a grudge against Facebook because of that, until a couple of weeks ago when, after reading all the hype, I decided to see what it was all about. And let me tell you – it’s the total opposite of MySpace. It’s organized, it respects privacy, but it’s also open and free like a social network should be. It’s respects “community” by respecting the community.

I’ve recently heard and read some interesting research about the difference between MySpace users and Facebook users. Some research indicates that MySpace users are a) inevitably teenagers and 20-somethings (who will inevitably grow bored with it) but also b) “lower wage earners.” I don’t know about all that. Personally, I just think MySpace is for social butterflies who are much more open about their personal communities and networks, than, say myself. I tend tend to guard my community from those who may either take something from it, or contribute something undesirable to it. That community tends to be, first, my professional network, and secondly, my social network. MySpace does nothing for either of those real-world communities.

LinkedIn is sort of a hybrid of my professional network and my social network, with the ratio being 85% professional and 15% social.

• The social element to my LinkedIn activity is typically my effort to help a friend get more involved in my professional network, for their own benefit.
• The professional element to my (now) Facebook activity is the opposite – it’s an effort to get my professional network more involved in my social life, and it’s network.

MySpace never served either of those purposes. I will not miss it. Not one bit.

NOW IF I COULD JUST CANCEL IT… IT’S A 4 STEP PROCESS!!!!

	Cancel MySpace Account
	We’re sorry you’re leaving MySpace! Please briefly explain in the form below why you’re cancelling. You can really help us improve MySpace! If you’ve been bothered by the amount of email you’re getting from other users on Myspace, you can stop notification emails without cancelling Click here to change notification settings. Click “Cancel My Account” to submit yourcancellation request. NOTE: You will receive an email from MySpace instructing you on how to confirm your cancellation request. You must follow the instructions in that email to complete cancellation of your account. Thank you.
	Cancellation Comments:

Cancel MySpace Account
	WARNING: Cancelling your MySpace account will PERMANENTLY REMOVE all of your profile information from MySpace, including your photographs, comments, journals, and your personal network of friends. This information cannot be restored. You may re-register your current email address after cancelling, but you will need to rebuild your personal network from scratch.
	Confirm Cancel Account ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CANCEL YOUR ACCOUNT?

Account Cancellation Request Sent Your request to cancel your MySpace Account has been sent. You will receive an email shortly with instructions for confirming that you wish to cancel.

You must follow the instructions in that email to complete cancellation of your account. Thank you.