Moving On From Facebook

Over the last few years I’ve found Facebook to be useful as a way to keep in touch with friends and family, to watch their lives unfold from afar.  Unfortunately when I open up Facebook now that’s not what I see, instead of news about people I care about, I feel like Facebook is trying to entertain me with an endless stream of news, cute videos and pictures.  I know that I could ‘tune’ my news feed to improve it’s relevance but I don’t feel like it’s worth the effort because I have an alternative.  I now have all my family on Instagram instead.  My Instagram newsfeed is cleaner, the Flow app I use to browse it is much faster and more visually appealing and the whole experience is a lot less ‘noisy’.  Of course I also still have my first love – Twitter, if I want to be distracted.

I’m still going to be using Facebook as a ‘tool’, because it’s the best way to interact with some communities that are important to me, but I’ve removed it from all of my mobile devices and I’ve restricted my viewing time to 10 minutes a day using the Focus add-in for Chrome. 

I’m also restricting my time on Twitter to 10 minutes a day, I’m online too infrequently to use it as a way of ‘chatting’ with my friends at work, but it’s still a good way to post updates to my diary, to keep loosely in touch with people and to scan the news.

I’m tapping away at this post in Caffe Nero, I started with a flare again yesterday after a long hard week spending 8 hours a day supporting Jennie in hospital, it’s probably put me in a bad mood, but if a bad moods what it takes to withdraw a little from social networking that’s one silver lining.  I did manage to get one nice walk in the sand dunes yesterday though and snapped the picture that opens this post.