Sidetracked Charley

It has been a dozen years since I began my first online journal on the now extinct Y!360. It was more than a blog and less than a chat room. And in spite of my proclamations to the contrary more than a social network. I made some long and fast friends and some not so fast as it were. And as Yahoo brought it to a close we followed each other to various other social platforms to stay connected. I came here because of its blog capacity and not its social networking. It took me a while to miss my ethernet friends that migrated to Multiply and then to Facebook grumbling all the way. I miss Y!360 still. It was a unique experiment and not everyone's cup of tea. But those of us that loved it have not been quite happy with anything else we find. And too many have learned to grumble all too well. When the dictators come out and think they can reshape the social platform and those on it I escape to the quiet of my forest - my blog - where I can do what it was I first sought the blogos...

I have two in fact. My regular profile and my fan page for Binford-Bell Studio. Or I think I do. Seems this morning Facebook is having a melt down. There have been an increasing number of glitches of late. Facebook sites improvements they are making as a reason. That and their fantastic growth and most of that among a different age dynamic - the older set. We utilize the popular social platform very differently than the teenage set. First we blog. And we want those blogs to post on Facebook. And they say they can be linked in easily. Yes, it is easy to link a blog in but they don't live up to posting new material every two hours promise. So now Facebook is trying to head us off at the pass by making its Notes more of a blog platform with fonts even and the ability to underline and bold text. They are a long way behind on that! I would be happy if they would just do well what they were designed to do which is let us interact in real time around the world. This morning FB will n...

I was a reluctant participant in Facebook. I actually opened my profile there more than a year before I did anything with it. It was the final gasp of Y!360 that more or less pushed me into looking for alternate social networks. It's a jungle out there. And Profiles, the Y!360 replacement, was not keeping its promise to be better. Blogger was being better; in fact best for blogging. But it just didn't give that sense of close connection 360 had with quick comments. Tried Twitter. I don't like to reduce my life to 140 characters. And frankly the people that began following me (even months after I stopped tweeting) scare me. One of my first forays into Facebook resulted in a major malware infection. (Near as my computer nerd can figure it came through the download of Javascript used to upload images.) Facebook does not vet all its cute little applications so for months I followed the 5 second rule. Check in for action, check out, touch nothing. Now I am on Facebook more and m...