My Social Endeavor

December 30, 2010 at 11:03 am (Essay)

I’m trying this crazy thing for 2011. It’s an online cleaning of the closet, if you will.

I follow so many people on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc. Many of them, I follow on all platforms. The problem with this, is we begin to see the same things over and over. Twitter updates mimic Foursquare entries which appear as photos on Facebook which turn into blog posts, etc. I can say this because *I* am guilty of the same thing. And there’s nothing wrong with this, inherently!

But because there’s so much chatter, we sometimes miss out on important things from those who we only follow on one platform. Just because they aren’t the squeakiest wheel. And I don’t want to miss out on what they have to say, or what they’re feeling.

If I follow people on a particular platform, it’s because I truly care what they have to say. It isn’t just so I can pad my numbers.

And because I truly care what the people I follow say, think and feel, I’m going to unfollow a number of them.

Let me explain.

If I follow someone on all platforms, in 2011 I’m going to weed out a couple of the social platforms that I follow them on. This way, I can still follow what they’re up to in Facebook, for example, but maybe not on Twitter or Foursquare. Or maybe I’ll follow their tweets, but no longer need to see their Facebook stream.

I know this may hurt some people -but I hope that they realize that I haven’t severed ties with them across the board. I’m still following them on a platform, and in the long run, I may actually interact with them more by the unfollows, because I can actually get through my social media streams rather than merely scanning or worse, ignoring many updates.

I’m sure that some will be hurt by this, and some may unfollow/ban, etc. in retaliation. I hope this isn’t the case. Consider this my “Please don’t be offended” post if we “break up” on one of them because it doesn’t come from a place of judgment on your updates. As you’ll see, we’re probably still friends on another platform, so let’s take advantage of that and catch up properly.