In recent months, I have been getting daily doses of déjà vu. When skimming through all my social media channels in the morning, I keep coming across the same articles, whether it is through my Facebook news feed, Twitter updates or YouTube channels. I also receive ‘Google Alerts’ emails which contains the same stories and links. This got me thinking, have I reached the critical mass of my social media consumption and where else can I go?

People tend to visit the same websites on a regular basis and that’s why I love having my info aggregated in one centralised place but what’s happening is that the same info is now centralised in 3-4 places. I have settled upon using the ‘Pulse‘ aggregator service to catch up on all the news that affects me and use Instapaper to tag and collate info for further review ‘later on’ (which is great in theory, but if you are a procrastinator like me, it means that once a month you blitz through the backlog and go a wee bit mental trying to consume all the wonderful information).

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

I initially started using the different social media platforms for different aspects of my online life

• Facebook – for keeping in touch with friends and organising meet-ups etc in an informal context
• Twitter – to find people that could help me solve problems, real-time updates, and passing on info that I found interesting in a more formal fashion than Facebook
• StumbleUpon – to break the ‘5-6 same websites’ rule
• YouTube – to watch anything of interest (and I have a lot of interests)
• LinkedIn – still use this intensively and think it differentiates itself enough from the rest of the ‘social world’ by having that layer of profession-ability as its main draw.

Somewhere along the way these platforms became blurred, as the info I received came from the same source. I would get the same info from Mashable’s Facebook feed as I would get from its Twitter account. My Google Chrome Mashable app also relays the same info as does their iPhone App. Their YouTube Channel also contains much of the same content. So which platform will win my ‘reduced attention spanned’ heart? Well Facebook seems to have caught the masses attention with over 600m users but personally, I just don’t like it….there I said it!

Facebook – the Social Shangri-La

As Hilton described it in Lost Horizon, the Shangri-La is a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world. Within this context, Facebook reminds me of a cult with Zuckerberg representing some kind of Jim Jones/David Koresh character trying to isolate the individual from the world [wide web] and creating an inward facing community which can only communicate with each other through the commune of the Facebook platform. Facebook even has its virtual recruiters out there trying to entice people to its way of life in the form of ‘Like’, ‘Send’, ‘Connect’ buttons etc. And what’s even more, people feel that they need to have these buttons embedded in their site and voluntarily add them. I know that I have the same button embedded on this very blog, but I have an excuse, I’m undercover…also Facebook seems to have achieved “lock-in’ status so I feel I have to conform. So maybe it’s not a cult but more like a mainstream religion, and I’ve had enough of Catholic guilt to last a life time.

All frivolity aside and please forgive my ignorance if I am missing something here, but is Facebook trying to recreate the web within its decidedly plain blue frame?

• Status updates & notes (boards & forums)
• Facebook places (4Sq etc.)
• Facebook Deals (Groupon, Living Social etc.)
• Messages (Google Wave, although now defunct)
• Facebook pages (eh..actual company websites)

Will f-commerce take off? Maybe it’s too early to make a practical judgement but according to the latest research, it’s still a while away from majority adoption.

I have quit the platform once before but rejoined when I heard how much FBML developers were making (which is of course now replaced by iFrames and more recently ‘WordPress4Facebook‘). At the risk of sounding like a heretic, I don’t see how Facebook will be sustainable. The ICT sector moves in cycles like everything else in the Universe, going from centralised to distributed and back and forth (mainframes vs localisation, web vs app’s etc) so I’m guessing that there will be a few more ebb’s and flows before we see the real impact of the Facebook platform.

For me, I’m happy using my Search, Newsreaders, Forums, Blogs, Wiki’s and other Web 1.5 tools to do all the things that I need to do on the web and with mobile browsing, I can do it from anywhere. The tools are the same but I have the freedom to use them where and when I want. How would you classify the way I use the Internet then – ‘secular media’ maybe?