Staying connected in 2012

The Old

What facebook is to me – Somewhat of a glorified address book. A place to toss everyone I know (or have known in the past) in the chance that I may need to connect with them at some point during my life – or they’ll need to connect with me. Of course, that assumes they’re on facebook.

What facebook is not, to me – A place to maintain a personal relationship with those closest to me. Between the advertising, feature bloat and nonsense from those I don’t care to hear from, there is simply too much noise. When something meaningful happens to “rise to the top” of the AI-driven news feed, the facebook environment sucks much of the life and meaning right out of it.

Google+ – I’m there… yet I’m not. It’s the same as Facebook, for all practical purposes. Only I have no plans to use it as yet another place to “toss” everyone. I check it once in a while. I may use it more to share and discuss tech-related content with friends and colleagues (since it conveniently integrates with Google Reader), but realistically I don’t see me using it more. I could definitely see me using it less.

Twitter – I enjoy it, and I’ll continue to use it as a tool to follow others and occasionally share a thought or useful/useless nugget of knowledge with the world. I’m using it less and less on a desktop these days – almost exclusively on mobile.

Tumblr – I hope to start writing (like this) more. This is where it will happen. I wouldn’t call it a New Year’s resolution, but certainly a goal.

The New

So, what am I enjoying right now?

Path. 

I am absolutely in love with Path. The concept is that you DON’T add everyone under the sun to your “network”. You use it only to stay in touch with those closest to you – though you can also share posts with the masses if the need arises. That said, I don’t necessarily like that when you share something like a check-in to facebook it does it by making a public page then sharing that.

The only frustration I have with Path is that I need to get those closest to me to sign up. It’s happening. Slowly but surely – which is probably a good thing. When people flock to a new social service it’s typically because it’s the “new big thing” and they quickly abandon it for the “old familiar thing.”

I’m looking forward to seeing how Path evolves. They’ll obviously need to make money at some point — it is free after all. I hope that they can successfully support the platform with premium offerings vs. selling its users to advertisers. But, only time will tell.