I belong to a few blog-specific social sites:
Today, I was in the process of setting up a Twitter account when I stopped myself and asked myself a reasonable question: Why?
At first, I put the gee whiz, golly neato widgets for MyBlogLog and spicypage on the sidebars of my blog. I recently took them back off because the image loading slows everything down. It's nice to look at… for a while. I'm keeping TheGoodBlogs widget on the blog (for now) because it blends in better and also doesn't have a bunch of new images to load every time the page is refreshed.
I use Yahoo Instant Messenger to keep in contact with my son in Germany. Regular phone calls from the Philippines to anywhere are too costly. I also use it to stay in contact with my wife's cousin in Phoenix, Arizona. Now, I'm using it to stay in contact with some other bloggers. While I like leaving it up for those reasons, I still find it annoying because it tends to interrupt me too often. Twitter is another kind of "instant messenger" and sure to be another source of distraction.
I can't keep up with the ones I'm subscribed to so why would I want to add another doohickey to the list? With the recent plethora of new blog-specific social networking sites popping up, we all have to ask ourselves which ones are worth being involved in and how much is too much. I'm not keeping Twitter and I'm not going to be a frequent visitor to any of the ones I already belong to, so why bother?
