Do you do Social Media?

I got suckered into the social media sites with the rest of the universe. I did hold out for a while but eventually signed up to facebook like the good little sheep that I am. Baa!

Facebook

Initially facebook was just a bit of fun, something new to waste time on. I quite enjoyed playing scrabble with a few friends (even if I did suck!) and some of the other cutesy applications were fun to start with, but it has worn off pretty quickly. I rarely log into my facebook account these days and I delete most of the email notifications it sends me. I must have about 457 million zombie requests waiting for me, not to mention a bazillion growing gifts.

I have recently read a few articles suggesting that facebook is just a giant data mining operation. I am not sure if I subscribe to that theory or not but I have been tempted to delete my account all together but then I have managed to connect with one old highschool friend and a few CISVers which is kind of cool… so I am thinking I might just clean it up, take out all the apps I never play with and leave it as a way to contact me if anyone is looking.

So, it seems, facebook is not for me, but since I am easily sucked in, like to follow the ‘in crowd’ and don’t have a mind of my own, I have been playing with a few other ‘social media’ type sites.

Del.icio.us
I use Del.icio.us as kind of a giant bookmarking service more for myself than to share with anyone else. Since I tend to spend some time at my parents using their fast net connection (ours is dial-up slow out here in the country) I was often frustrated at not being able to find a link I wanted when I was at their place so started using Del.icio.us to save links to so I could access them anywhere. Simple and easy. I am sure it does much more than that but for me, that is all I need.

Stumbleupon.
I’ve also recently signed up for Stumbleupon. I am still not sure of all the ins and outs of stumbleupon but I’ve started to ‘stumble’ a few sites that I like. Mainly blog posts that I read and think someone else might be interested in, or that I want to remember and come back to. I have accumulated a few stumbling friends along the way and the best thing about it all. is that when I am bored or have a few spare seconds to kill I can take a look at one of my friends and see what cool sites they have found. Now for someone who loves blog hopping and reading random stuff on lots of topics this is way fun! An added bonus us that by stumbling someone’s blog you can help them gain some more traffic – which as a blogger is always appreciated.

I could definitely use a few more stumbleupon friends so I have even more options for wasting time looking at nifty web sites. So if you stumble go to my page and add me!

Kaboodle
Kaboodle is big in digi scrapping circles, from what I can tell mostly as an easy way to share a ‘wish list’ of goodies that you’d like to buy. From what I can gather the great thing about Kaboodle if you are a digi scrapper is that you can netowrk with heaps of other scrappers and designers and if you are lucky the designer of one of your wish list items might RAK it to you!

I have a Kaboodle account but I haven’t ever really used it. Though it might be useful as a place to compile a ‘shopping/wish list’ for if/when we renovate – though I sort of use del.icio.us for that already and I can’t imagine the swimming pool manufacturer logging on to kaboodle and gifting me a swimming pool just to be nice can you?

So I am dabbling in social media – enjoying it while it is entertaining and vowing not to get so sucked in that I can’t walk away when it is no longer fun. How about you? Do you do the social media thing?