I have had an epiphany due to this Buzz thing. Social media isn’t content. It’s narcissistic crap. No one cares. I’ve been wasting my life!

-Leo Laporte

If I throw out a Tweet who hears it? When I log into facebook I am overwhelmed with the vast quantity of invites, gifts and other fake interaction that floods my inbox. I in the past looked at sites like Blippy that shares your purchases, Yelp which shares your reviews and even Foursquare that shares where you are at and rewards you for being an addict of the system. I tried out the Google Buzz, I tried out the Twitter. But I now find myself really getting bored with the whole social media scene.

Back in the days when Social Media first came out it was a neat concept. It was a way for you to interact with one another in a way that was never before possible. It allowed people to easily follow others and stay in touch.I remember one of the first sites I joined was a social playground called Firefly which has been a defunct site for over 15 years since Microsoft bought them and shut them down. I should have known that with the death of what I believed to be one of the original social media sites that I should have just quit with it.

As I grow older I find myself just running out of time to even care that much. I’m on Facebook, I tried to make an effort to stay in communication with my family but like everything else in life Facebook has gone from a neat idea into a site that is nothing more then a personal information farm. So many people plug in so much personal information about themselves into that site without realizing the consequences. I can’t believe in the year 2010 people still are so naive and don’t realize once you publish ANYTHING it will never go away. It’s sad to think that if you tweet that you had a ham sandwich earlier today that your tweet will stand the test of time. And I’m not talking people posting stupid things, the sandwich was merely an example. I challenge you to look at the people on your friends lists and carefully scrutinize what they post and ask “would you hire them if they interviewed for a job?” I can tell you almost everyone on my list I wouldn’t. It’s true I’ve had a lot of interaction with my family since they all got on facebook, but most of it’s been via third party apps like Farmville, MafiaWars or other games where they send me requests for stuff. I haven’t said “hi” to these people in years but every week they need help leveling up in their current addiction.

Social media really used to mean something. I could get online and chat with my friends across the country in a great environment. No commercial ads, no viruses, nothing to worry about. But now these days everything is so commercialized. Yes even MY site now hosts commercials at the bottom of some posts. I’m as guilty as everyone else.

But we went from a world that had something to say to a world that will say anything, to anyone, at anytime. Heck have you seen some of my tweets? When I first joined Twitter I followed over a hundred different people because what they said was real, I’m now down to 30 something and most of those I don’t even read their tweets because I don’t trust them. So many people now tweet for money. They will “share their opinion” which is getting to be a paid for opinion.

What’s real these days? Can you trust anything you read?

Web 2.0 had promise, but it became so commercialized that it lost it’s true value. I would rather PAY for a service that’s good, then use a service for free that has it’s momentum change at the drop of a hat based upon who the highest bidder is at the time.  I’m talking to you Zuckerberg.

Let’s journey down memory lane real quick to the first time you got on Twitter. You could search for anything and it was easy to find tweets on a topic. Now you search and all you find are retweets where people are trying to enter a contest and you see the same post page after page. No real content, just the same crap page after page. Twitter has lost it’s appeal, its value.

I’m not ditching the web all together, I think I’m really just ditching social media. I just bought a new domain name, I plan on using it. But I think I may sever the ties to most if not all of the social media sites I’ve joined. I mean really, does anyone care what I am doing at any particular time? Hell I’m not even that interested in my own life, I can’t imagine that you are.

I think what I’ll do is stop with the twitter, the google buzz and focus on real content. After all, it’s hard to say what you want in 160 characters max. On my site, I can write what I want, when I want and it can be as long or as short as I want it. I think the quality and quantity of my posts will greatly increase with this move. Plus the content I publish will start to be owned by me. Yeah, when you post to facebook, twitter or buzz (or any other site for that matter) those sites own your content. It’s no good.

So I apologize for people that read my blog and find new posts by getting twitter alerts each time I write a new post. I think this will be the last alert you get, alerting you that this post is published. I still offer the RSS feeds that you can subscribe to and receive email notifications when I post something. But I don’t think I’m messing with twitter or Buzz anymore. In fact I think I will start to remove those feeds from my site. After all, no new content being put into those environments, no need to pull the latest feed.

We’ll see how this goes. And I encourage the rest of you out there in the world to analyze what you are doing. For me this came after reading a blog by one of the people I follow, Leo Laporte. I’ve also been reading a great book called “Hamlet’s Blackberry” which is a phenomenal book on living with technology and frankly there’s way to much content creation by myself and others, I think we all need to live a bit without technology. Not completely, I need my iPad. But we can take steps back every now and then and enjoy the non technical world of ours.

I challenge you to figure out how many hours a day you spend with your gadgets. It may just surprise you. Read a book, sit on the porch, play with your dog, go do something that has some value to it. When you die no one is going to care what level of a game you got to. I have yet to read one tombstone or obituary that said “jon was an avid gamer that reached level 52 in ________.” It’s not those people you read about, it’s the people that do something with themselves, they help others, invent new ideas or just better themselves. If you want to be  a successful person, it’s best to mimic them.