Jenkins tweet folo... GD issues an apology

I use Twitter more as a gatherer of news than anything else. I can follow my favorite writers, newspapers and topics and find the stuff I want to read all in one place as opposed to going from Web site to Web site. Plus, it's much less cumbersome than Google Alerts. I think I'm following three or four of my friends who aren't jpurnos, so the amount of "I went to the grocery today" stuff I see is pretty limited.

 

I suppose it makes me a bit of a curmudgeon, but I never signed up for Twitter and really don't have plans to. I also nuked my Facebook account this past weekend. I tried it for a while and just don't like it. I don't care that someone is eating a jelly donut or taking the kids to their soccer game or scored 1,000 points on Mafia Wars.

I know this is a Twitter thread, not a Facebook thread, but along those lines, I also started to feel like Facebook takes the mystery out of life. My entire personality and background there for the viewing, along with everyone else's. I don't know. I just didn't like it, and I'm far from a Luddite. The Internet can just be a huge, huge time suck, whether it's Twitter, Facebook, or whatever else is new in social networking or news feeds.

I actually like when I wake up in the morning and am uninformed about the day before, rather than following every single sports and news story as it occurs. It's liberating that way.

 

My biggest problem with Facebook, other than how mind-blowingly non-interactive it is, is that every single person from high school I have "re-discovered" seems to be around the clock doing something depressing -- such as nothing. I have no problem eating pudding with someone I love, but I also don't pop on or rush home and tell the FB universe that's what I'm doing.

 

For Facebook, I just took out all of the Farmville, Mafia Wars updates and all of the quizzes and -- poof -- it became manageable again.

 

I did all that. Then I hid almost all the people who posted too much mundane crap or who were just ships passing through my life at some long-ago point (i.e. high school classmates). So I kind of piecemeal quit. It had been coming for a while. It felt kind of cool to actually go through with it. I have a lot of friends who never joined in the first place, and others I am friends with that never, ever, ever use it. So I don't think it's as big of a deal as it seems to not be on.

There's something I oddly like about the idea of someone - employer, new friend, etc. - investigating me on Facebook and not finding a trace.

 

I could be wrong, but I'm getting the feeling that the average Twitter user is actually older than the average Facebook user.

 

I would agree with that. I know a lot of older people who have resisted facebook, but love Twitter.

 

You're right. According to Pew, the median age of Twitter users is 31; for Facebook users it's 26.