It’s been quite the week in the world of the internet. Twitter has been up and down multiple times every day, newly minted twitter-challenger Plurk had some initial compatibility issues for some Firefox users (myself included), Kwippy beta invites finally started hitting the stream, ping.fm made a very public reentry to the scene and Amazon.com crashed for well over an hour Friday afternoon (which is really just the icing on the cake of what has been a very active week on the interwebs).

Burn Out

My last column was about the backlash that Twitter was seeing from their seemingly ever increasing down-time, scalability issues and lack of communication. Well, none of that really slowed down this week, in fact, it got worse as Plurk began to quickly invade the twitterverse. Then came Kwippy (which hasn’t gotten nearly the attention that Plurk has) another twitter alternative. Then came the deluge. Suddenly everyone is talking about how great Plurk is (sorry Kwippy, you’ve got a nice site, but Plurk won this round) and that Twitter is dead.

I personally cannot count the number of times that I switched back and forth between Plurk, Twitter, Friendfeed, Socialthing, Ping.fm, Brightkite, Pownce, etc… over the last three days. All that movement got me thinking, when does your footprint get to be too big? How much is too much when it comes to social media. At present I have 15 services being imported into my Friendfeed, and I am sure that I am on the low end of most users. I have 4 different status services (not counting plurk, kwippy or brightkite, which FF does not support as of yet), 2 bookmarking services (plus diigo, evernote, social|median and twine), 2 music services, two blogs, etc… But what does all of this actually get me?

The answer, it gets me a whole lot of duplicated information, that’s what. Now I’m sure that there are probably FriendFeed users that have imports setup for all 35 services in Friendfeed, so what does that do for them? Aren’t we inadvertently adding more static than we need to our information soaked minds? I know that I am, especially since I don’t even use half the services that import to Friendfeed on a regular basis (I don’t even know if I remember my StumbleUpon password at this point).

And just how reliant should we be on these services? You would honestly think that some people feel like being without Twitter for an hour is akin to not being able to breathe, or eat, or think. I understand that these communities mean a lot to people (myself included, I have met some great people through them and I love using them) but at some point don’t you have to sit back and realize that maybe you’re a little too involved? And you know what the real problem is? It gets worse every single week. There are so many new services muddying the waters, that it’s hard to focus on one long enough to really decide which one is the best for your needs.

Maybe I just don’t have the same kind of time to devote to social media that others do, it is not my job per say (although it is a part of my job), and I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve got stuff to do, a lot of stuff that doesn’t jive well with twittering, powncing, plurking, kwipping, or brightkiting. I do those things when I can, but at some point every night, the phone goes away and the computer lays dormant. I don’t know how some of you do it, it’s all very interesting (well, most of the time) I just don’t know how you keep up.

For me, I think I’ve hit my limit. I don’t know if I can actively participate in this many social networks/services at once (I can’t even count the number of socnets that I am in, since I am sure I would leave some out). As much as I enjoy them, I have to cut back; it’s too much for this junkie. What about you? Do any of you feel like you’re just repeating yourself all the time? Should we perhaps be trying to weed out the services that don’t fit in to our lives and sticking to the ones that do? I am all a-Twitter awaiting feedback to this column.

Greg Hollingsworth is a marketer and blogger who also writes about politics on Devil’s In The Details.

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