Are you addicted to Twitter? Janet Meiners Thaeler (@Newspapergrl) thinks I am. Guy Kawasaki has a great SocialToo survey asking the question. Janet even gave me an award for it! (and I sincerely appreciate it – I love awards!) I’m not so sure I’m addicted though. Even though I do have near 10,000 updates on Twitter and am active on the service, I think I use FriendFeed much more, and in a much shorter time frame I have near half that in likes and comments on FriendFeed. I think I also use Facebook more – I wrote two books on it after all.
Twitter is a tool, and I use the best tool for the job. This is part of why I left Twitter a few months ago – Twitter wasn’t doing what I wanted it to. When I realized I wasn’t going to get better from other services I came back. Twitter is where I post my thoughts and share things that I can’t post to this blog or elsewhere. This status propagates my Facebook status (through the Twitter App on Facebook), as well as FriendFeed, where more people comment, and I can have more personal, lengthy conversations in those places. Twitter is a tool I use to meet new people, to share thoughts, and build relationships, just like I do on FriendFeed and Facebook.
Could I leave Twitter? You bet. If another service with a much larger network, and just as many opportunities comes along with an actual revenue model and something I could rely on to not delete my followers or data, I’d leave in a minute. It’s part of the reason I have a close eye on FriendFeed, and have built an early hold there to build a strong network. I see potential there. I’m not addicted – I use the best tool for the job. I’m building a network everywhere I go.
The honorable Chris Brogan (if I may call him so) enlightened me back at BlogWorld. He was joking around at the time, and I can’t even remember our conversation that led to it, but his comments were something to the effect of “Listen, TechDork, technology doesn’t solve problems! Humans do!” Oh how right he is. How do you define Social Media? Social Media is about the technologies we use to enable real-life relationships. Emphasis on real-life. If a service isn’t doing that for you in the most effective way, or if you can’t do it with just one service – be prepared to leave. We can’t afford to be addicted to these services. I know I’m not.
Janet had a great idea though. What awards would you offer your Twitter friends? Janet and Larry Weaver have come up with “Social Media Awards” you can create for your friends. Share yours below.
Stay N' Alive 
there should be some kind of award for most likely to excessively “love” songs on last.fm which then clutter up everyone's friendfeed account.
I like it when people do that – I've gotten some really cool music from
that. You can always hide it though.
Since Ping.fm came into my life Twitter is not all that important to me anymore. It is just one of the many microblogging services and certainly not the best. That said, it does have a huge amount of users and is probably the best microblogging service to start with.
Since Ping.fm came into my life Twitter is not all that important to me anymore. It is just one of the many microblogging services and certainly not the best. That said, it does have a huge amount of users and is probably the best microblogging service to start with.