Tonight, I found myself in a strange spot. I left a comment on a microblogging site called Plurk where I said that I didn’t much like the service for me. I don’t. The user interface doesn’t work well for me. It’s a little too slow, too disjointed, and doesn’t scale well. It works great if you have a hundred or two hundred people to follow, but beyond that, it gets messy fast.
People responded back that they were upset that I didn’t like it, or that I hadn’t given it much time, etc, etc, etc. All of their thoughts were valid. Except it didn’t matter to me. I’m not saying they shouldn’t like it. I’m not saying it’s not a good platform. All I said was that it wasn’t for me.
Do What Works for You
Welcome to the fishbowl. In here, we get a little bit too excited sometimes. We get zealous about the bleeding edge. We sometimes get tired of things before most of the rest of the Internet has even found it. And we often crave connections and meaning and value out of these shiny objects.
But don’t let people tell you that you’re wrong for not liking something. Not into blogging? Swell. Don’t like Twitter? Fine. Hate podcasts? Perfect. It’s okay not to need/want/love the whole landscape. There are lots of services that people love that don’t fit my personal needs. I appreciate the services, but I’m not using them much.
If you’re here for business, for entertainment, to meet new friends, great. Do what works for you. Don’t let everyone else call you wrong for not liking MySpace, or for liking MySpace. If you’re excited about Second Life, don’t let me tell you that you’re silly just because I’m not a big fan.
Learn what works. Try out lots of things. And then go with what you end up liking. No harm. No foul.
I’ll be over here trying out new things still, but also going with what works for me.
You?
Photo credit, lbonnett
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