Lawrence M. Schoen

Over the last couple of days, several people have sent me invitations to join up with Google+.

Naturally enough, the first few times I tried to do this, Google+ informed me that they’d “temporarily exceeded” their capacity. But I persevered, and now I have been anointed, or accepted, or whatever the buzz word it.

All of this comes on the heels of an insightful post by John Scalzi about having one’s own domain-based presence rather than simply relying upon the latest, and all too fleeting, flavor of social media.

I’ve been through most of them. In the bad old days of 300 baud modems, I was on PLINK and then PORTAL and then, gasp, the shiny new kid on the block AOL (even with a free account as an assistant to the Typography form, oh those halcyon days of yore). I briefly did the MySpace thing, never got into Friendster. I never heard about the Dueling Modems home until it had faded and been more or less replaced by SFF.net, and I was lured away from there by LiveJournal. My wife suckered me into setting up a Facebook account, and perhaps most recently I’ve learned to use Twitter (poorly).

I rarely cruise Facebook; it’s just not an effective use of my time given the several thousand people I’m connected to there — and has Howard Tayler has pointed out, this may be the saving grace that makes Google+ workable, allowing users to define “circles” of people, and browse their posts accordingly. Livejournal supports something like that too, but the set up for it was always more of a pain, and the usage not much better.

And speaking of Livejournal, I’m not there much any more either. Which is a shame, because I’m missing out on events in the lives of people I really care about, but it’s all about ease of use and time suck and balancing the two.

Most of my posts are to my own blog (which get mirrored to my Livejournal account, and linked to at Twitter, and when I remember to, manually linked to my Facebook). I’ll probably go looking for a WordPress plugin that lets me do something similar with Google+ (assuming I can find someone to walk me through the install).

So, for now, I’ll be exploring what Google+ has to offer. But I think John had it right, in the end, I’ll be focusing more and more on what I can do at my own domain: http://www.lawrencemschoen.com