Scribbles

Some of you may have noticed the Twitter feed I added to the sidebar here, as part of my experimentation with micro-blogging.  In the two-three month period that I’ve used Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook status extensively, it’s clear that I won’t be abandoning them any time soon.  The down side of it, is the encroachment of those mini-posts into this blog.

Less blogging on my beloved Wordpress platform aside, I find the new set of tools truly interactive and rewarding.  It’s amusing that I had done this way back ago, completely quit, and now immerse myself in this new generation.  It all started back in college, when the IM du jour was ICQ.  Then after college, I paid for a full version of Trillian so I could post whatever came to mind on my status updates in every IM medium conceivable.  The only problem back then was that it was great one-on-one interaction, but for one-to-many, I was in a constant state of reaction: I hear the IM sound, see the pop-up, and feel obligated to respond instantly.

It got to be too much during  the intense year of b-school, so I quit altogether.  The time zones didn’t work for me to interact live and this blog was the perfect medium to broadcast my whereabouts and happenings to people who cared.  I could post at my leisure and never feel the pressure of replying to IM.  There’s no instant in blogging.

Oh, but the brave new world snuck up on me so sneakily.  Blogging is still rewarding and the comment system works fine in that interactivity.  But then came Facebook and their implementation of status updates.  And then they allow us to comment on others’ updates, publicly.  The next thing you knew, the Facebook feed became a reverse blog, streaming in all your friends’ tidbids into that interesting mosaic of news, jokes, jibes,  break-ups, and job search.  It even comes with pictures!  I think it’s great.  There are some people using it as their blog without ever realizing they were blogging.  It’s just so much easier than setting up a blog.

And it’s that ease that makes it more powerful than blogging.  I meet a new acquaintance, we connect on Facebook. Whenever he logs in, he can see the updates of all his friends, including mine.  That’s a lot easier than subscribing to my blog.  I can login to FB or my FriendFeed and see all the happenings of hundreds of people in one place, but it’s highly unlikely that I would check 300 different blogs, even with a great RSS reader.

But that same ease of use also induces neglecting this blog.  Status updates and tweets are a lot shorter.  And unlike 5 years ago, I can post them directly from my phone instead of when I get back to the cube.  So instead of taking the effort to blog, the seductive nature of taking short-cuts has led to silly notions of my friends piecing together the last 10 postings and figuring out what I’ve been up to.  The ego!  So for my new year resolution, I promise, once again, to humble myself and to share more fleshed out thoughts and stories.  “Eating in lil Tokyo, again” on Twitter won’t cut it.  Sure, the short feeds will still be around, but as a compliment to what happens here.