Deliver us from Facebook

Reading Archbishop Vincent Nichols’ thoughts on the evils of social media made me think that I should give it another go, since, generally speaking, anything that the Catholic Church is opposed to, I’m in favour of. (Though the Vatican is giving out mixed messages on this subject; the Pope himself is on Facebook).

Regular readers will recall our last dalliance with Twitter. I was reluctant to tarnish the Zen-like purity of that single-tweet feed (which, despite a six-month silence, has managed to garner 61 followers, perhaps disproving the theory that Twitter users need constant gratification), so I set up a new account in my name, and while I was at it signed up for Plurk and Friendfeed too.

I’m not intending to document all the humdrum details of my life, but just to publicise this blog by sending out tweets and plurks whenever I put up a new post. I’ve set the services up so that they all cross-post each other; the resulting feedback will hopefully get the message out. What I’d read about Friendfeed had led me to believe that there would be some way to automatically submit posts to places like Digg, reddit and Stumbleupon too, but that doesn’t seem to be possible. Maybe I need to read the instructions some more. There’s probably some other service that I haven’t heard about that will do that, since I can’t believe that no one would have thought of developing such a useful thing.

Anyway, all this took a few hours, which, on reflection, would probably have been better spent just writing something interesting. “Content is King” used to be the mantra, but in our Twitterfied world it seems that what you say is a becoming less important than how many “friends” you have to say it to, whether or not they are really listening. Maybe the good bishop had a point after all.