There are a lot of tech journalists who are constantly pushing their view that Google+ is dead. I've never believed them as they only gave the platform a brief try. And by brief, I mean generally only a couple of weeks. Then they abandoned the platform because no one they knew was on there. They never understood that it was never about who you know, but what you know. If they want it to be about who you know, they needed to go to Facebook. If all they want is to spout off their opinions in a one sided fashion, they need to go to Twitter. Yet all they do is talk about how great Google+ is, how annoying Facebook is, and how horrible Twitter is.
But this isn't about that as I've gone off about that before. This is really about an observation I've made over the last few months. I've noticed that social networking seems to be slowing down. I'm not basing this on anything more than my observations of my wife's habits and my own Google+ stream as I don't have a Facebook account (or any other service they've purchased) and I can't get into my Twitter account (that's another long story that I went off about before). What I've noticed is that my stream has slowed down. It used to take me several hours to catch up with all the posts that came up while I was at work. But now it takes me less than an hour to get through everything. My wife recently started watching some kids for a family member, which means she doesn't get a lot of time to read through social media posts. But I've noticed that it takes her less than a couple of hours to go through her posts on both Google+ and Facebook (she has the same issue with Twitter as I have).
So, this leads me to a theory about social networking. That theory is that we have gotten past the fad stage of them. This means that we aren't spending all of our time staring at the screens posting and commenting on posts. And trust me, that isn't a bad thing. If you need more evidence of that beyond my simple observations, take a look at what Facebook and Twitter have been doing lately. Facebook has been changing their algorithms to push more and more news articles into your stream, moving you slowly away from posts about your family that lives 1000 miles away and to what they "know" you want to see. Then they started adding in videos that automatically started playing when it appeared on your screen. To sell this prime realty to advertisers and news organizations, they started counting it as a view when it was on your screen for a certain period of time, I believe they count it as a view if it's on your screen for 5 seconds. That's just enough time for you to scroll past it! And how about Twitter with the live broadcasting of NFL football games. I can't imagine watching a game in that fashion. I don't know about you but I find the hashtag in front of everything to be utterly annoying. I had to yell at the kids so they would stop because half of their sentences would contain at least 1 hashtag in it, even though they don't have a Twitter account.
So, are we burnt out on social networking or is it just me? Leave a comment either on the blog or on the Google+ post...
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