The Angst of Internet Oh-Nine

What do you do when you realize you spent hours wasted on Facebook and other social networks? You make the most of the experience by drawing a cartoon about it, of course!

I must say I am not that much into Twitter. While I did start out on Twitter I found the "conversations" there too messy. I don't see how people follow hundreds of people with Twitter. I only followed a handful and had to drop some people who tweeted too often. I still use the web browser instead of some fancy Twitter client so I don't see threaded messages. I prefer to see a variety of tweets, so if one person monopolizes my Twitter page, off he goes.

Plurk, on the other hand, keeps messages threaded so that you see both the original posts and replies to them. How logical! And no need to do @ and #, just address the person's name and it's automatically highlighted. I even use Plurk to update my FB and Twitter status now. You just have to watch your karma, a point system that probably doesn't mean anything, but fun to maintain. Don't plurk for a day or two and it drops fast, whereas climbing back up is measured in units of .01.

I also spent a lot of time on the reunion for my high school class, Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens, New York, Class of 1985. I had to sneak the school reference into the cartoon. Hopefully I'll snare a few more alumni.

Waste Less

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy? But too much Facebook time and Plurking sure waste a lot of Jack's time, too. Here's how to waste less with all these social networking activities. Especially applicable if you find yourself constantly checking email, Twitter updates, new Wall writings, or blog comments...

• Gmail's Select Unread followed by Mark Read is a good thing to use. Nowadays a lot of my mail is not personal stuff, but not spam either, like announcement for new games from distributors that I like to know about, newsletters, news alerts, etc. When time is tight, just make them all Read and move on.
• In Plurk, Mark All As Read is my friend. I don't follow that many people but some days there are still 20 or more new entries. Mark All As Read is what I do, then if I have time I go back to read some entries. BTW, I never understand how people follow 100s or 1000s of people. You lose that personal connections at that high number.
• Also in Plurk, how about check up on things only if there are x updates? I use 5, but feel free to bump that number up. Then resist the urge to check Plurk when there are fewer than that figure. Likewise, you can do the same with email, unless you have some really urgent email expected.
  
• In Facebook, if you play some word games in which each game has x matches, pay attention to what score your opponent has at the end. If he already played all his matches and has a total of 100, no need to earn 1000 points, just 101 is enough to win.
• Also in Facebook, visit your groups only if there are new activities. Or maybe just once a week will do. Some groups either have too much activities or too little, so once a week is a good schedule.
• Buying bones for your neighbor's dog so he can leave your Lil Green Patch alone? Like how Costco and BJ's work, buy in bulk so you don't have to buy so often. Better yet, scrap the app altogether. It is OK to ignore these inane back-and-forth giving.

There, with all the time you save, you can go join some more back-and-forth giving schemes...

Qwerty @ Plurk

Plugging Plurk

Thanks to my ex-colleague TT, I've discovered Plurk, an alternative to Twitter. It is not as well-known as the big Twit but that's fine. Microblogging tools like Plurk is useful for writing something when you don't want to write a lot. You may have noticed the Plurk gadget I added to the blog's sidebar. It was not as easy to setup as Twitter's, but a visit to the Share Your Plurk Page field of one's Plurk home page to get the UID should take care of things.

One fun thing with Plurk is the Karma Points. It's just a way to track how much time and effort you put into using it. Load a picture for your profile page, rant and rave about whatever in your mind, make friends, etc. and your Karma Points go up. Stay away from Plurk and it will go down. Interesting. I cannot help thinking about someone's Karma running over my Dogma...

I look forward to Plurk having its own app for Facebook and the iPhone/iTouch. There's some hack to get Plurk working with Facebook and on September 9 developer Ryan Lim just submitted a Plurk app to the Apple App Store. Ta-ta, Twitter!