Has it really been this long?

Hi again.

It's been a long time, hasn't it?

I do believe aside from YouTube spam, it's been nearly 10 months since I last wrote in here.

Some of it is a continuing lack of time. I only have so much time once Kylie goes to sleep to work on anything, and typically I either want to play a game, work on something with my channels, contribute to a tech site, write something, or just look up various things.

More often than not though, by the time Kylie is asleep around 10:30 or 11pm, I'm exhausted. I don't have the energy to do anything too strenuous and I'm creatively tapped out. Then I end up having trouble sleeping, or Kylie wakes up a few times, or the cats run me over, etc, etc.

Really though, it just comes down to not getting enough sleep consistently, working a different schedule at work, and a rambunctious child that isn't always so willing to go to bed, plus the fact that I'm still sharing an apartment with my ex and her oldest. There's always something to clean-up, something to take care, and that takes a toll as well.

That's not what I want to write about though.

See, recently my sister messaged me through Facebook and told me someone I used to know way back when had tried to reach her two years ago looking for me. I got curious and went into messenger and discovered I had 3 different message requests, all from at least two years ago, that I had NEVER seen. I had no idea because at the time, my privacy settings were much more strict than they are now. Facebook just didn't notify me and I had never noticed.

Two were from ex girlfriends that I hadn't spoken to in a long while. The third though was from a girl I had talked to many, many years ago. Hell, I'm not even sure what social media site it was to be honest (I have a guess in my head, but cannot confirm), but it pre-dated Facebook, Twitter, and even Myspace. I remembered chatting with her, but what we talked about escapes me. What I'll never forget is how uniquely her name is spelled. It's really hard to forget a name when it isn't spelled like you'd expect.

What she remembered was enjoying my writing, which makes sense. Years ago, I often bounced from site to site depending on where I could write. I know I used to occasionally write short stories, but much like even now, a lot of my writing was what was going on, things that agitated me, and a whole lot of woe-is-me type of nonsense that I try to avoid these days.

What struck me is how much effort this woman made to try and track me down two years ago. She tried to add me on Facebook (which was impossible at the time), and when that didn't work, she found my sister and tried to reach out to her. Of course, my sister didn't get it until this week, but once she did she let me know, I checked mine, and reached out to this woman.

Much to my surprise, she was excited that I messaged her, which in hindsight really shouldn't have surprised me. One of the things that I remember about her was she was one of the few genuinely nice people that I encountered in social media's infant stage, which is when we originally talked. While there are often still concerns about whether someone's who they say they are, back then it was even harder to pin down whether someone was legitimate or not. This woman seemed too good to be true, but she was always up for a chat.

It's also a reminder that distance isn't what determines friendships. She lives in a different state from me and has experienced some things of her own in the time we haven't talked, but I think that's only going to give us more to talk about in the coming days and months and I'm interested to see what her life has been like and see where it goes.

It kind of ties into what I had for a blog idea earlier about how many early "social media" sites were really just sites that were all about rating one another and so on. I remember a few that existed, "SWYDM (aka So Would You Do Me), "Hot or Not," and the shamelessly titled "RateMyBody," which was EXACTLY how you think it would be like.

Yet SWYDM in particular had a good run where I talked with people and had a lot of fun, even if at its core it was a relatively shallow site. The people I met though made it more than what it was originally meant to be.

Like a lot of things on the internet though, the site evolved and changed, and as it did, it became less appealing for me to hang around on. It eventually changed its name and I eventually stopped going there. I want to say it was after that   when I migrated to Myspace, where I spent a good portion of my time before it became such a waste and Facebook rose to prominence.

Life moved on, things changed, people came and went, and here I am, in December of 2016, still living with my ex, her oldest, and of course little Miss Kylie Brooke.

There's been a small influx of familiar faces of late though; people I used to know years ago finding me on Facebook and chatting it up on occasion. It's been nice to reconnect with some and remember why they were fun.

*Intermission*

I'm currently typing this blog post on my new keyboard, a Logitech G910 (the unboxing is one of the previous posts from this), which is part of why I'm anxious to write more in the future. Typing things up on a laptop keyboard is not fun and this keyboard is a HUGE improvement.

I also want to mention if you like old-school video game type of music (which I just found out is called Chiptune music), an artist by the name of tiasu is incredible. His stuff is on Spotify and if you want to buy individual albums, you can find him on Bandcamp. It's catchy, it's diverse, and I'm digging it so far.

*End Intermission*

I can't promise I'll be posting a lot in the immediate future, much like my YouTube and Twitch channels have been suffering. I do believe things will pick up once my living situation is different and in terms of games, I definitely think things will improve when I finally can put together a beast of a PC and upgrade the rest of my equipment as well.

I just know that there are some out there who really enjoy when I write and it's something I should really be making a better effort at when I have 20 minutes to sit down.

I do have my annual letter to Santa to compose, plus I do occasionally have ideas pop in my head. The key is to remember my Note allows me to write on the screen with the stylus even when the screen is off, which is a great way to jot down ideas.

I also want to record a vlog at least bi-weekly, but that's dependent on things happening in my life worth recording and talking about. They are fun to put together though, so I should try to do more, especially when I have such a fantastically awful story about Walmart and shoes for Kylie to relay.

I'm going to attempt to record that this weekend, but we'll see.

It is the holiday season though, so for the love of all things great, please be nice to each other. I know a lot of us are still trying to wrap our heads around Donald Trump being elected President, but it doesn't make it okay to act like pieces of crap towards each other. Show some love, be kind, and remember that person you're disgusted with is an actual human being and you really aren't any better than them.

I'll catch you guys later.

Maybe.

The Ups and Downs of Social Media :: Part 2 :: The Battle for Popularity

If you missed the previous entry on the precursors to social media, you can read it here.

By the early to mid 2000's, the number of people with access to the internet was growing and the idea of being able to network via the internet was starting to gain traction (note: this is not a fact; just based on my own memories). It wasn't going to be enough to just e-mail, instant message, and visit someone's web site. No, people wanted more and in 2003, the first shift in how the internet was used took place.

Myspace was, by many accounts, the originator of the social media site. Launched in 2003, the site quickly became the most popular social networking site, and at one point even passed Google as the most-visited site in the United States.  You could add friends, send messages, view each other's photos, share status updates, and basically anything else they wanted you to know.

For a while, Myspace was THE place to be, but to me, it quickly became a popularity contest. People would request you as a friend just to boost the number of friends they had, but had no real interest in interacting with you, which seemed to defeat the purpose of the site. This didn't deter me from using it for a long while, especially the blog feature, but as time went on, it became clear that Myspace was losing traction.

As recently as a couple months ago, I had checked back in to see what the site was like, and unfortunately, it hasn't improved much. The site was slow, glitchy, and seemed to be overly focused on musicians and other celebrities, making it less of a social media site and more of a gossip site to me.

Looking at the path it's taken since the peak of it's popularity in 2006, the site will likely never ascend back to the levels of Facebook, Twitter, and other sites.

A sobering number is the number employees that Myspace has. In 2009, it had around 1600 employees. 2 years later, that number was down to 200.

What happened?

Well, Facebook decided to open its doors to anyone rather than just college students, developed a cleaner interface than Myspace, and took off.

I was slow to embrace Facebook myself. I had learned to enjoy Myspace and I had met some fun people on there, plus it had allowed me to keep in touch with people I had already known in real life. While the repeated friend requests from people who weren't actually trying to be friends was annoying, it ultimately didn't bother me too much.

However, I had a few people I worked with who had migrated to Facebook and encouraged me to do so. Like anything, it was awkward at first, and I certainly struggled initially to understand what I was doing on there, but I eventually realized that more people I knew were on Facebook, and it had helped me reconnect with several people from high school, which was an unexpected bonus.

I can't remember the exact point in which I completely abandoned Myspace, but it was roughly around 2011 when I stopped logging in regularly and moved strictly on to Facebook. I didn't use any other types of social media for a couple of years, choosing to focus on Facebook if I used anything.

The thing that became increasingly annoying to me was how many different sites seemed to be popping up. I know I've only mentioned the major players so far, but there were others methods, other types of sites that existed for short periods of times.

Some were geared more towards professionals, but many just seemed to be geared towards creating popularity contests. I joined my fair share of smaller sites, but not enthusiastic about them, I typically didn't stick with them for long periods of time. Most people on the sites were flaky and not actually trying to expand social media horizons, and that remains true to an extent to this day.

I haven't mentioned Twitter yet and it's not a mistake. I avoided Twitter for a long, long time, mostly because I didn't see the point in limiting how many characters I could use to get a point across. Why limit myself to 140 when I could use as many as I want on Facebook?

It seemed silly.

Then, in February of 2013, I took the plunge.

I'll admit, my first tweet is underwhelming, but it was the exact reason I joined.  I had started my YouTube channel in September of 2012, and I quickly realized integrating it with Twitter could be beneficial (although not NEARLY as much as it could be). I made the decision after a couple of months and more than 2 years later, it's pretty much my preferred method of interacting with others online.

As of today, I've tweeted over 16,000 times, I have over 640 followers, and am following over 600 accounts I'm following. On Facebook, I have roughly 70 friends, but maybe post once or twice a week, and it's usually just pictures of my child. On Twitter, I sometimes post multiple tweets a day, and that doesn't include automated tweets that come from my YouTube channel and/or Twitch channel.

Twitter has proven to be an exceptional method of communicating with people and receiving feedback on virtually anything I say or do. While the number of interactions based on the number of followers is still pretty small, I've been reminded more than once that people are reading what I tweet, even if they aren't always responding.

I've also occasionally dabbled with Instagram, but that's not nearly as often and I've yet to find a good way to integrate it with my channel.

Google+ was an option as well, but I've never felt like that service ever fully realized what it was capable of, especially given Google's ownership of YouTube. The forced integration upset many users, although it didn't bother me all that much. I just never saw Google+ become what it could be, thus it was never really a viable option for me to completely jump in on.

In the end, I use Twitter the most, followed by Facebook, then Instagram in terms of the major social media sites, but the internet is full of smaller scale social sites.

Steam itself acts as a social media platform with it's chat/party system, and other sites such as the Gaming Tribe are trying new and unique ways to bring gamers together.  It's not perfect, but it's a good start, and not just because that site is always giving stuff away.

The internet has grown since the early 2000's and social media has become a major staple of people's lives. But is it really all it's cracked up to be sometimes?

Next, social media has brought people together, but it also can bring out the worst in individuals who thrive under anonymity.