My Life On Line (as of today)

mazeIt seems to be a bit slow on Ello today. Perhaps it is being given a chance to catch its breath. This will have been quite a week (or two) for the fledgling social network. A lot of growth, a little controversy, some good PR, some anti-PR, some slowdowns, some spam-schemes and some new features.

All of this, plus a number of conversations I have had about social network usage in four venues, including this one, naturally has me thinking about what I am doing in this regard. The short answer is “too much.” Clearly, if I am having this discussion on four venues, I am spending too much time at this social network thing, especially since my group of friends on three of them is mostly the same people.

Before you ask, I don’t Tweet or use Facebook or do Google+, for many of the same reasons that I no longer watch commercial television. All of those services are Big Business, for one. All three are in business exclusively to make off with my personal information under the guise of social networking so that they can sell me to the highest bidder. I would prefer not to be a product, so I just don’t go there.

My current networks are small and non-commercial, mainly, though one is very ineptly commercial. That one is Plurk. I have been there for over six years and have so far made over 300,000 Plurk posts. I met my significant other on Plurk, and know a number of other people there in person now. Nobody has ever heard of it, it specializes in 14-year-old Taiwanese girls, so I am not their demographic, but I have a lot of strong acquaintanceships there, and I’ll be staying. It is not real active, it does not take much time every day and I would miss a lot of people there if I gave it up.

The other three are much more problematic. Of the three, ADN is of the longest standing in my personal world. I bought into it fairly quickly, based upon the idea of paying for a social networking service, rather than having that service be supported by selling my personal details. It was a good idea, and it may have worked, but the owners could not make a decision about what they wanted to be when they grew up.

They fell for the promise of big-numbers with some fairly ludicrous back end usage scheme, and decided that the only way to make it work was to make the service free, and thus to have big numbers of members to sell, one way or another, at the end. It was not only a much different idea than they had sold me, it was a very bad decision, and it led directly to a bad end. Please note that these are my impressions, and some would disagree, but I think this is what happened and why.

So I don’t have to make any decisions about what to do about ADN. When the owners essentially pulled the plug, the developers of ADN clients lost their incentive to continue developing those clients. That lack of development is already making a lot of ADN clients behave more and more flakily. As the interwebz keep moving and ADN stands still, there will soon be no real way to use the service except Alpha, the browser-based solution which came first. Thus, ADN is just going to die a quiet death due to lack of support.

I intensely dislike that. I loved the original ADN philosophy as it was sold to me, I like many, many people there, I like the developers that I have met and purchased from. It does not deserve to die. But that is what comes of insisting that size is the only thing that matters. Perhaps the ex-owners now understand that people matter, too, though I doubt it. There are some efforts to revive or save ADN, but they they are too little too late. ADN is a dead man walking.

I am also using, though less and less, an IM service called Telegram. In the initial panic that came from a feeling that ADN was going to quickly explode rather than slowly fade away, a number of ADN members moved to Telegram as a place to keep track of each other and be ready when ADN finally turned the lights off.

The people in the ADN group on Telegram are mainly still on ADN and are also mainly on the new service Ello. It makes less and less sense to stay there: I don’t need three places to talk to the same people. So sometime in the next few days, I will pull the plug on my personal use of Telegram.

My fourth social network is Ello. It is now where ADN was a couple of years ago. There is no real business model. There are no mobile clients. They are having problems on a regular basis. But they are VERY actively developing. Unlike ADN, who’s is headed for a slow crash and burn, Ello has alive and vital and shows promise. Just now, Ello is my best main choice for a social network that will make me waste some time. 🙂

But it is not a waste. All the ADN and Plurk people who have started to use Ello have a lot to teach me. All I have to do is listen and interact. That makes all of this a no-brainer, at least to me. I have an action plan!

  1. I will stay with Plurk because it’s like a reunion of old friends every day.
  2. I will sadly leave ADN to the fate its owners crafted for it, a slow death in the fast lane.
  3. I will remove myself from the ADN group at Telegram.
  4. I will happily hang out on Ello and see what the make of it. The ride might be fun.

Your mileage may vary, of course. But I think I have leaned to read the tea leaves. I have been participating in social networking since before social networking existed, beginning with the CompuServe CB Simulator in 1980. Yes, 1980. That’s 34 years ago, maybe before you were born. I may not know everything there is to know about this subject, but I have been around long enough to know how I will chart my own path. I hope your sorts out as easily and as well.

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About kdfrawg

... is a writer of books, blogs, bios, and software. Thirty years in the software business burned me out on programming languages so I'm working on proficiency in English. I term myself monolingually challenged. The good news is that novels don't have to compile. :)

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