“TDavid, if I could get all those people to read my blog I would definitely abandon the sites, but that will never be the reality.”

Never? Never say never, mon

TDavid, if I could get all those people to read my blog I would definitely abandon the sites, but that will never be the reality. More often than not I am pushing blog content out to them in an attempt to get more people hooked in to my RSS feed.

Also, keep in mind I am a musician, and the networking sites are a good way to find potential listeners and push both blogs and music out to them in a common channel. By the same token, I definitely don’t hang out on any sort of IM/Skype, because it’s just one more background app to interrupt me while I’m playing/recording music.

I played CoH for the first 1.5 years, during which they never officially released any game stats for the powers (e.g. damage/level, recharge time). Being a math-headed sort of gamer, I spent a *lot* of my spare time calculating how powers worked so that I could better understand my choices across the ten heroes I actively played, and every time I had it figured out they would make a tweak to the system. Eventually I realized that I was spending more time trying to figure out my hero powers than I was playing music, so I quit during the launch of CoV (two years ago).

(Also, going back a few post topics, it was one more example of creating content for a third-party - my own original heroes, complete with backstory and customized costume, but they didn’t *really* belong to me in the event I wanted to write a comic book or novel about them - because they existed in a shared universe.)

I still miss it HUGELY. Really it’s the perfect game for a casual gamer - there’s so much there to explore, and the stories are so well-written, all without the drag of equipment and spells and all of that nonsense. It’s just starts to sour when you get uncasual enough to need hard data on game mechanics.

I’m with you Peter, but let me play devil’s advocate a bit on this: “they’re just a chance to quickly update a large group of my existing friends on how I’m doing.” — why can’t you do that at your blog? Is it because more of your friends are on MySpace/Facebook,etc and it’s more convenient for them to follow you at the social network? I don’t see why your blog can’t be the update place? Perhaps have the main blog where you blog about your regular category and a sidebar/Twitter-type blog that provides these updates in case you don’t want to mix/match with your regular commentary.

It seems like a lot of extra work updating multiple places when in reality you can update your blog and provide friends with an arguably more dependable service without advertising making some company $$$$. You can be ad-free if you like or at least your friends know, hey, if I buy something from an ad on Peter’s blog, he’ll get a spiff.

Social network sites aren’t useless, they provide the benefit of connecting with people with similar interests who aren’t already following you, but I think a better long term strategy, if you will, would be to encourage people to go to one place (not multiple) to see what you’re up to. And that place, as you left that comment earlier this week, is probably on your own soil.

As for the ‘hanging out’ thing, you don’t leave yourself logged into an IM or some type of chat 24/7? Skype? A messageboard? Nothing? My definition of “hanging out” would basically cover being online and connected to something, not only a place where you are actively involved in it. There are long periods of time I’m logged into IRC that I’m not really “there.”

The only virtual hanging out I’ve ever done has always been in the arena of gaming - primarily in City of Heroes. There it didn’t really matter how old people were, or what level of education they had - all that mattered was that they were a superhero in their spare time.

Even though I didn’t exclusively play “in-character,” when I left the game none of my game friends knew my actual gender.

I tend to hang with people +- a few years of my age in rl. Time is really so short, I can’t really tell ages anyhow (aside from maturity in conversation). Most true maturity shows through their textual conversation anyhow.

obsessively ‘friend’ each other

- yea this is pretty pointless I agree!

I did go and signup for a facebook account. Mainly so I could get a pulse on what the kids are up to these days. I know my daughter has an account. In order for me to relate to her better I thought I’d jump in. This way we can have similar things to talk about. At least I’m familiar with some of the workings of the social networking.

Thing is at almost 15 - she things the social networking thing is a bit pointless too. Anything that can be said in Facebook - could be emailed quicker, or SMS (text messaged for all you old/ non tech folk ;P) even faster. So why bother?