Flickr and Twitter: Too Much Effort (And then some...)

The past few weeks I've been working with two forms of social media that I had thus far managed to avoid.  I feel compelled to write about my experiences with each both because this sort of reflection is required for a class I'm taking and because I spent a great deal of time pondering what about these sites make them unique enough to fulfill whatever cyber-voids that Facebook, blogging, commenting, texting, and emailing don't.

Twitter

Of the two, Twitter is the most important.  This is both because its sudden ubiquity, but also because it has become our de facto agora in contemporary society.  I had a very hard time crossing into the realm of "Tweeters" (this is the right terms for someone on Twitter, right?), because I am aware that should any amount of fame or infamy ever find me, my Twitter posts will be the likely point of focus of any public speculation on my state of mind, interests, or opinions either relevant or irrelevant to whatever notoriety I may incur. Thus, picking a  user name on Twitter was a dizzying challenge of prediction and restraint.  Do I use my real name? Do I use an absurd name? Will all of humanity either find me pretentious or ridiculous for choosing or not choosing either one of those? (I eventually settled on the name "TysonMe"--decidedly not clever, but probably unoffensive as well.)

Tweeting hasn't been too much of a chore. It's as easy as sending a text message or updating my status of facebook. Which of course brings me to my biggest issue with Twitter: What distinguishes it from a facebook feed or text message?  I suppose the extreme public nature of Twitter posts is the essence of what makes it different than a facebook post (but only marginally so, unless your facebook privacy settings are cranked all the way up).  At the same time, though, this makes me hesitate at the point of tweeting anything: Who is going to read this and why?  There is an existential crisis built into the Tweeting process, something simultaneously akin to public nudity and voyeuristic urge, which although probably ignored by many prolific Twitter users (Yes you, Kanye), that creates the risk of the whimsical gaining ground on the profound on happenstance alone.

Answering the question: "What's happening?" has never been such a simultaneously banal and profound act.

Flickr

My first thoughts while trying to register for Flickr: Yahoo has deserved to suffer a long and protracted death.

My current thoughts about using Flickr: Yahoo deserves to suffer and continuing long and protracted death, preferably involving bees and feral dogs.

I've posted hundreds of photos on Facebook, used Picasa any number of times, and uploaded photos to everything from newspaper websites to blogs.  The process of setting up my Flickr account was agonizing?  What do I get in return for setting up a YahooID?  Given the effort, time, and frustration of setting up a web-based account, then having to essentially repeat the process on my phone, I think I may have rather gone through the process of acquiring an STD--at least some portion of that acquisition might be enjoyable.

What did I get for my efforts? Well, not that much. Although I appreciate all the functionality in tagging, geo-tagging, cropping, rights-setting, etc, that Flickr provides, I haven't really found myself warming up to the whole process.  Granted, I'm not the photo-taking type, but the level of investment just to get pictures out and available to my friends and family using this site just doesn't provide the type of return that other sites I already use do.