Ok… here’s where I talk about all things going on in my internet life.

First, Dailybooth… the picture-a-day site. Well, some people do a pic a week, some treat it like hourlybooth, but I digress. I’ve decided to stay on the Dailybooth site. As you know, if you’ve read my earlier postings last week, you know that I went through some personal struggles, with a friend on that site, that ended with ties being severed. This was very painful for me to deal with, as I had gotten to really like that person. Unfortunately, my wife’s feelings were hurt and she felt threatened by some things that were said and, instead of leaving well enough alone, I tried to make all parties reconcile. Bad mistake; you can never make two people get to know and like one another, no matter what you do. Because of my mistake, and other things that happened as a result, I lost a friend. I was so hurt by this, that I just wanted to leave and never return. I felt that, because of the circle of friends on there that this friend and I share, it would be painful to comment on the same pics and see them commenting as well, and not be able to reach out to them.

Well, I thought that I was doing some long thinking in the decision to leave, but I now realize that when you think about what to do in a situation, while you’re still having strong emotion, you’re not going to make an objective decision. So, after more hard thinking for a week until last night, I decided to stay with the Dailybooth community. Several things played into this decision. First, all of the comments from friends on my “farewell” pic made a lot of sense. For example, GratefulDogZX, a friend on DB and overall good guy, put it best when he explained that all of my other followers shouldn’t have to lose me because of a falling out with one person. Second, a quote from Bill Cosby, that sometimes appears on the random quotes section of my blog sidebar, states: “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” It’s so true; you shouldn’t try to be all things to all people. Third, someone else’s feelings were hurt on DB and mentioned that my decision to leave was probably a good route for them to follow. Well, in my thoughts this week, I concluded that no one should have to leave a site because of personal pain over any situation or anybody (and this person even went so far as to say that they missed me and our conversations on DB. That meant the world to me).

Even my wife doesn’t want me to leave Dailybooth, even though she’s gotten pissed about the time I spend on it sometimes!

My decision to stay on Dailybooth is conditional. I got so wrapped up in it personally, that I lost focus on the other sites in my internet existence that are important to me. Even more so, I lost focus on the things that matter to me in real life. This can’t happen again. This blog, for instance, was severely neglected for almost two months! Now I’m reminded that I have to always strive for balance in everything that I do. If that means setting time for this and that and the other thing, then so be it. I value Dailybooth and everyone in it, but I value the rest of my life too, y’know? I say this more to myself, than anyone in particular. The site, and the way things work on it, is just that addictive… even if you’re not even remotely an extrovert by nature. With that being said, I’ll move on to the next topic.

This last week enabled me to blog more, and also catch up with my friends and family on Facebook. This is an area that is also needing some attention, bigtime. However, I will NOT get caught up in those app games on it (such as MafiaWars or other games). I have too many other interests to divide myself with! However, chatting it up with everyone on there this week has been a blast.

I’ll be posting a bunch of pictures to my Flickr account today or tomorrow. I’ll also share some samples and links here. I’ve been using Flickr a lot more because the convenience and community sharing far outweighs that which I have in the picture gallery on my personal site here. That’s not to say I won’t use the gallery here; it will be for more personal galleries and family pictures. This is one area that Dailybooth helped resurrect in me; my love of photography. I’ve been using my camera more and learning manual shooting to get the best out of my pictures. As a result, I have a new, potentially wallet-breaking hobby!

Of course, I still have Twitter, the stalk-me micro-blogging site. My interaction with that will never change. So, go ahead and “stalk” me there, if you’re not already! The sidebar here has my recent tweets, so you can see what I’m up to, even if you don’t feel like visiting my Twitter page.

I haven’t been making videos like I used to. YouTube is still an excellent forum for sharing videos, but I haven’t had much reason to do a video yet. However, I will still make videos on special occasions or when I really have to share/review a new acquisition. All of my recent YouTube vids are in the sidebar as well, so feel free to watch me being, well, boring old me… hah!

Well, thank you all for reading this. I realize I just unwittingly gave myself some goals to work on. However, these are healthy goals and ones that I think I can reach. One more goal for me: write an entry a day in this blog. So far, this week I’ve been doing pretty good with this objective. It shouldn’t be so hard to, at least, devote about 15 minutes into the blog. It can even be an extension of what I’m doing on Dailybooth, since that has been a “blogging” platform of sorts.

I’ll conclude the blog entry here with this thought. One could just as easily live their whole lives on the internet, as they would in real life… but it just wouldn’t be as interesting as what real life offers us! Cheers!

This conversation I had with a new friend, on Twitter, is one of the more memorable small chats I’ve ever had on the internet…

LL: TCM is showing my favorite movie of all time…Gone with the Wind. I swear, if they remake that movie, heads will roll!

Me: @Lemonlily74 Now that you said that, I’m sure some idiot in Hollywood is going “OMG that’s a brilliant idea!!”

LL: @ChrisW357 …… O_o…..crap.

Me: @Lemonlily74 (incidentally, that’s the best response I’ve ever seen tweeted! LOL!!)

LL: @ChrisW357 Hahaha! Thanks! Hahaha!

To those of you still trying to understand what Twitter’s about, well, this is a perfect example: People posting their thoughts in small bites (what’s commonly known now as micro-blogging). Others people following them because their thoughts just might be interesting. Someone following this “tweet stream” and picking out a random blurb that interests them, and then responding to it which (hopefully) fosters communication. Hence the term, “Social Micro-blogging”

Just like the above example, I’ve had some very stimulating conversations with people on Twitter. And it’s those spur-of-the-moment conversations that are the most precious, because of that spontaneity!

Cheers!

Oooookay! I’m finally writing a blog entry again. What a small miracle this is. Now my readers, friends and family can see something else besides Twitter updates! I guess some of my internet social taverns are threatening to take over the blogging aspect of my ‘net existence. Probably because, in my mind, I felt that those places are much easier to update, even though Wordpress entries can be written on an iPhone. It’s a sign of our culture; wanting things to be in bite-size portions… like Twitter’s 140 characters-or-less micro-blogging format and Dailybooth’s show-my-life-off pic-o-rama.

That being said, I’m faced with the prospect of updating my Archives And Links page and I figured I should make a blog post detailing these little internet homes of mine.

My Twitter Updates – This is the big one. Everyone these days is either talking about Twitter or tweeting on it! It really is microblogging at its finest.

My Last.fm music page – This page will show you what I’ve been listening to lately… on my computer’s iTunes, my iPod or my iPhone.

My Dailybooth page – This is a recent addition for me. This is a photo-social experiment that encourages people to post a photo a day, and comment and follow other users as well. Some people, of all ages, snap some pretty interesting photos here!

My YouTube page – Yes, this page started out as a video blog, but it quickly turned into a place to show off my puzzle hobby. I’ll try to make other videos soon!

So there you have it! Micro-blogged updates, music, photos and video. But there’s some other sites that deserve special mention:

My Facebook profile – Of course, you have to actually join Facebook to see my profile and interact with me. Just in case you do sign up, that’s where I am!

My Blip.fm page- I often find myself wondering just when this site is going to be shut down by the RIAA. If you’re like me and you have a mind a-buzzing with the soundtrack of your life done by your favorite bands, this site lets you communicate your musical thoughts.

My page on Geeks.pirillo.com – I used to go there often and update my page, but lately it’s become almost as bloated as MySpace. Bloated, as in making my browser turn into a turtle while my CPU cycles go through the roof. Still, I tend to make semi-regular visits, since I officially labeled myself as a “geek”!

Well, I can’t make promises of “I’ll blog more often”, because I do the opposite quite often, much to my dismay at myself. However, you can look at the mentioned pages and track/follow/pursue/stalk me on a regular basis! At least this gave me an excuse to make a blog entry, but I still have a very late part two entry of our Germany vacation to write here. I haven’t forgotten!

Cheers!

Today I officially deleted my MySpace account. I actually was going to do this last Wednesday, but I forgot about my promise to myself to nix the account. That’s how unimportant MySpace really was to me.

Yes, I had a lot of stuff on there. I had a music player; a really nifty Flash player that played some mp3’s I have hosted on this blog’s server. I had some neat pictures. I had some witty (I think) things about myself on there. I also had a YouTube player on there playing my latest vids. However, all that pales in comparison to the one thing I’ll miss the most. Family. My cousins sometimes talked to me on my account. Maybe this will encourage me to email them more often. Yes, my wife is on there too and, yes, she isn’t happy about my decision to scrap the account. But it was my decision, mine alone, to make.

Maybe I’m just weird. Last night, my wife told me that my sense of humour and taste is sometimes sophisticated and sometimes stupid. So, yes, I can appreciate what quality I can find in all things. However, I personally feel I had outgrown my tastes and perceptions had grown away from MySpace. My needs simply changed, and sometimes we need to do a bit of cleansing to get rid of some of the things we don’t need in order to make our lives a bit simpler.

A while back, I wrote a post about the differences I saw in MySpace versus facebook. I think that was the start of my reasoning and thinking that led me to the decision. Facebook fits more of my needs, so it makes sense to keep that account. Today, during this writing, I’ll also update my list of profiles in the sidebar. Not much has changed; in fact, there’s more of me spread out across cyberspace! Click the links, investigate and maybe add yourselves on to those sites if you want. I’d love to see you all there!

So… what do you, my readers, think? Have you had, or still have, a MySpace account? Did you ever think about deleting it? If not MySpace, what social networking site do you most frequent and what do you like about it the most?

(Social) Cheers to all!!

Most of my family and friends are on some kind of social networking site. Of course, the two big ones are facebook (yes, with a lower-case ‘f’) and MySpace. Of these two, I greatly favor facebook over MySpace for many reasons. In fact, the only reason why I haven’t dropped my MySpace account altogether is because my cousins use it and I use it as a form of communication with them. I’d much rather see them on facebook. (BTW, I didn’t bother posting any hyperlinks; you can see all the links to my social-net pages in the blog sidebar.)

Anyways, let’s get down to the reasons for this post’s inflammatory title…

1 ) facebook = social engineering (practically) down to a science. MySpace = social disease that has a rather painful cure.

2 ) facebook seems more maturely oriented with less chances of running across questionable people/groups. With MySpace, you can be sure that every bit of sleaze is going to be promoting itself to you in the form of friend requests.

3 ) facebook user pages are much less customizable. This may be seen as a bad thing, but consider this; you may have (as have I) run across some MySpace user pages that had embeds that did really funky things to your browser, thus making your processor temporarily go into a fit. Tie that in with the fact that MySpace pages are more easily configurable to enable phishing attacks.

4 ) Going along with point 3, the main way of customizing your facebook page is through the use of facebook apps. MySpace, in an effort to compete, enabled the use of these kind of apps on their pages. However, these apps can interfere with some of the customization that the user has already implemented on their page. As if the typical MySpace page doesn’t look jam-packed enough!

5 ) facebook gives you the option of letting people find you based on your educational and work history, and it makes an effort to show you people that you may know. This is what it’s there for! I’ve had my facebook account open in much less time than the MySpace account, and I got reconnected with a dear high school friend through facebook. MySpace is mainly geared towards making new friends and self-promoting, and it definitely shows.

6 ) With all this in mind, facebook is geared more toward an adult, or mature teen, crowd. I’ve joined groups in both sites, and I’ve had more stimulating conversations in facebook. MySpace, on the other hand, is more for the immature, party-hardy mentality. (Disclaimer: I’ve nothing wrong with partying and you can be mature and let loose, but I guess I’ve met more immature people with that kind of mentality.) IDK… Maybe I’m just a boring clod!

7 ) How about privacy? I’m an open book to even my casual acquaintances, but I like the fact that users have a greater range of privacy settings on facebook. MySpace is more limited on privacy but, to its credit, has gotten much better on privacy issues.

8 ) Last point, and this is about look and feel. facebook just seems much less bloated and jury-rigged together, unlike MySpace. Maybe facebook simply has the benefit of being a newer site; MySpace is one of the first, and still the biggest, social networking fish in the cybersea. facebook just feels much cleaner and faster than MySpace.

Maybe I was nitpicking through those points, maybe not. However, anything that I can say good about MySpace, I can also say about facebook. In fact, anything that I love to do in MySpace, I can also do on facebook! If any of you run across this article, and want to share your thoughts on these two social-net giants, please do so in the comments. I’d love to hear everyone’s take on the issue!

Cheers… and have fun connecting, or reconnecting, with friends!