The Changing Landscape of my Social Network Use

I used to be a big fan of Google+ (ok there I said it). I liked it because Google+ straddled that landscape between Twitter’s 140character-limit (which I’ve just crossed in this post) and the long form of an essay or a blog post.

Twitter for me has devolved into a couple of lists and canned searches that I track — mainly people I work and collaborate with and technologies I develop on. Twitter’s follow-and-be-followed mantra has long since stopped making sense to me. There’s too much noise and it’s no longer rewarding.

Don’t even get me started on corporate twittering? I sigh every time I notice a ‘follow’ from a company because I fit their customer profile, lurking in the background never engaging directly with me, their intended customer.

Facebook — I mean where do you start — I suppose I do love Facebook. It does connect me to people that are part of my life and are important to me. Former school friends and university friends that have moved away or I have moved away from, stay connected.

Facebook connects me to my real-life social life which these days revolves around whether or not my son’s got football training on Monday & Wednesday nights.

Furthermore, those funnies that used to be attached to corporate emails are great aren’t they? And all those life-affirming messages across pictures of sunsets and babies… well they do just that.

So enter Medium. I’ve been tracking Medium for a while. It’s a social platform for people writing about their opinions, thoughts, and ideas. The content tends to be high-quality and high-fidelity.

Medium has enough features to connect & follow people but that is not its raison-d’etre. Its core strength to me is the ability to straddle that 140character to blog post gap.

I could spend hours surfing (remember how we used to) Medium content, reading and exploring — making notes in a draft entry about my own thoughts.

So will it succeed where Google+ failed? Medium is not Google+. Medium is not trying to be a Facebook- or Twitter-killer.

The conversation has moved on from social networks to going back to the open web — a place of interesting documents attached to URLs but with enough features to stay connected to those documents.

Exciting times… again.

Originally published on ijonas.com