Writelife and Me on MySpace, and Facebook

Wandering around at mybloglog, I came across Bill at Writelife and his post about whether social networks outgrow themselves. I started to comment there thus:

“I was rather hoping that you’d have a convincing argument for starting with these bloated sites. I have never even visited Facebook or MySpace because I hear so much about the millions of different uses for them. I want something targeted, or at least that I can easily point at what I want and say, ‘Go.’ While it’s fabulous that literally millions of people are out there at any given moment, most of them don’t care what I have to say. That’s fair enough, because I don’t much care about their respective dogs and relationships.”

The I realized that I’d rather post my reaction here. The rest of my thoughts on the matter go something like this:

I sink enough time into writing and blogging and networking as it is. Am I missing traffic on these sites? Yeah, probably. Is it from people who are likely to be “repeat offenders”? Nope. While I love the idea of really getting my name out there and having people read not only my blog but my Associated Content articles as well, I only have so much time and energy to invest in making that happen.

I don’t write about things that every third person cares about, and that’s okay with me. I love writing about them. I’d rather put my resources towards doing well what I love. I get enough chaff as it is. (You should see some of the things that come up when you click “Next Blog” at the top of the screen!)