A couple days ago, on Amy’s Ramblings blog, I read her post on how time consuming social media had become for her due to so many updates and ‘noise’ to deal with. I was thinking on the subject for some time and I agree with her points.

I have an ambivalent relationship with social media. I like it, I encourage people around me to actively use it but I have some problems with it. There are many more or less similar services and catching up with friends on different services is not as easy as it should be.

An example scenerio: I have 3 friends on 3 different microblogging services. To stay in touch, I have accounts all three of them. When I have an update, I have to update three of them so that all friends can see it. Guess what it would do to my friendfeed; one message repeated three times. To avoid it, if I update 3 different accounts with different messages, my 2 other friend on other services won’t be able to see some of the updates and … etc.

This fragmentation and duplication of the messages are the main problem of social media. It is terribly time consuming as well as addictive. Monitoring all your feeds, sorting out and filtering useful information from useless soon makes it tiresome routine. This is the point I end up quitting my social media watch for a while, only to return some time later, baffling immense number of updates I have no way of catching up.

Ok, this is mostly because neatness is not really my forte. And applications I tried didn’t help the situation, either. I use Posty to manage and monitor microblog feeds. It allows me to view only the last 20 message. But I need to see all new messages since I last checked. Posty won’t let me. And I don’t know if any other application that can work on Linux do. Gwibber don’t have a feature to show public timeline, and I love to check timeline for randomness’ sake.

Can I add one last complaint? So hard to follow a conversation if three or more people are involved on a microblogging platform, harder when using microblogging application. It would be lovely to see a conversation among there or more people in a threaded way or something.

I’m searching for one central place to control this wild wild social media beast and more control over what I’m sharing to whom.