Friday, May 10, 2013

A Farewell to Social Media

Just deleted the Facebook account. Waiting for the "Delete" button on Twitter to re-appear or the account to go away on its own.

Letting go of Twitter and Facebook was a fairly easy decision. We will miss the users they both directed to the blog. Our pageviews will drop by more than half just a few days after we saw a record daily pageviews, over 160 viable views in one day.

Both services have helped make our blog known to a wider audience, so a thank you is in order.

Being stubborn and self-righteous, we decided to regard the Twitter suspension as an expression of the concept described in "The internet shoal of fishies".

Trying out social media was as much about testing the automation capabilities and earning bragging rights for a potential real job as it was about putting the whacky, bitchy, funny, and at times a bit boring posts out there in a forum that made them easier to find.

We have not mentioned it, but now is a good time to spell it out: Just like dropping Twitter and Facebook, there will be a day when the blog will end.

Since the start, our intent has been to pull the plug on the blog once it "jumped the shark".

Whether we will have the wisdom to recognize the moment is, of course, a different question.

But we hope.

There is hardly anything more depressing than witnessing the total unraveling of a good story, the slow artificially delayed fading of a sparkle.

Little Feat, still rocking, said this decades ago: You know you're over the hill when your mind makes a promise your body can't fill.

We will not be able to escape this fate for ourselves, but it is in our power to spare the blog the same fate.

We will continue to be right here  in our little corner of the internet, but without the glitz and glamor of one (1) Twitter follower and without a Facebook user interface that is still as crappy as when we signed up.

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