It got me to thinking about the differences between these various methods of self-expression and communication. It’s true that all these social media/social networking sites are attractive, but for different reasons, and possibly different reasons exist for different people, or different moods in the same person. I like Twitter for its immediacy and the ease of very short form updates. I like Facebook because it makes it easy to share photos and my Twitter feed, and for the interactions in comments on my page and those of my contacts. LinkedIn is a good place to keep my expanded résumé, and offers what may be more serious discussion forums than I’ve found elsewhere (although I find I don’t have time to follow them). The dozens of Ning networks I’ve signed up for took a lot of my attention for a few weeks earlier this year, but now I rarely look at them.

For me, my blogs are completely different from the networks I belong to. When I do post blog entries, they tend to be longer and better researched than social network posts, which might explain why I don’t write them as often. It’s a bigger commitment of time and effort. Blogs also have a more permanent feeling to them, with several years’ worth of entries available in their archives, while Twitter and Facebook postings quickly scroll off the page, sometimes in just a few hours, and certainly in no more than days. Indeed, some Twitter users, like Jay Rosen of New York University’s Journalism Institute have been agitating recently for Twitter to provide a searchable archive of past tweets, which highlights the fact that such an archive doesn’t exist.

As we used to say on the pre-Web BBS, YMMV (Your Milage May Vary), but for me there’s a time and place for all these expressive outlets, and I’ll keep using them at least until the next greatest thing comes along.

For instance, in late December I discovered a nifty website/Web app called Scrapplet. When I created a free account and started building pages on this site, it was more or less just for fun, to see what was possible. Now, though, I use it for my own organization, mainly to keep track of all the social networks I’ve joined. One of my pages is simply a collection of hyperlinks to each network’s page, so when I have a few minutes to check out the discussions, but don’t want to bother with organizing browser bookmarks (which are only up to date on one computer at a time), I just pull up my “social networks” page and click away. I was even able to quickly sort the network links by topic. Most important, the app works visually, via drag and drop. It’s possible to enhance the pages by adding code, of course, but that’s not strictly necessary. Virtually anyone capable of handling a web browser should be able to create a personal site at Scrapplet. It could be used to quickly prototype webpage designs, too.

Oh, and those online social networks! Obviously, to be active, it’s necessary to be online. Yes, I can see the sites on my iPhone, but except for a few individual networks, they are dependent on full-sized web browser screens, and use lots of visual effects. In at least one, I can’t even post a comment in a group discussion from my iPhone because of the underlying code. Apparently it requires a plug-in not available on the iPhone, like Flash or something.

But the thing that is really irritating is the way flakey internet access is making it difficult to do research for the book I’m working on (about ebook publishing), and to work on my websites. I would like to revamp my old History-eBooks website, and I have been working on it, but being frequently interrupted by crashing routers or bandwidth restrictions make that an uphill battle. In the time I’ve been able to get online, though, I’ve found a new tool for developing blog page themes, WordPress Theme Developer. It’s a free application running on a website, and works very well indeed, but yes, you have to be online to use it. Argh!