Your life must be truly odd. Well, either that or people who refer to you as “friend” have a different understanding of the term. Or, I suppose, it could be sarcasm? A jest?

To be honest, I haven’t tried Twitter, but I really can’t see myself doing so. I believe I’ve just exceeded the maximum length of a tweet, as a matter of fact, and haven’t said a darned thing, really.

We’re avoiding the smartphones. Call us Luddites, if you will: we’re sticking with long-form, and there we’ll remain.

As to why: it’s more about who’s archiving what, claiming ownership of the content, etc. I just can’t see leaving my content in the hands of some corporation other than my ISP (which allows me to backup my content, and to quit when I wish).

Just because I don’t say anything of importance doesn’t mean I should forgo ownership of that content, as is the case with FaceHook. Twitter, to a lesser extent, although it’s archived and kept forever … which is a bit troublesome.

Network analysis, is what I’m avoiding, with all of them, I suppose.

Facebook I spend no time on, but Twitter is a real, valuable and fun tool. It’s not without reason that most of the old gang of regular bloggers have moved on to Twitter. It provides a superior, more immediate publishing platform for short form conversations, comments and link/news sharing. I think the key to that has been the mobile element. Most of my friends now use a smartphone of some flavour to access Twitter rather than a PC or laptop. In addition it remains one of the few social sites that it is resistant to trolling due to the nature of the system.

I’m not sure where blogging goes next now the first flush is over. I think most people are happy to migrate on to one of the other social platforms that provide a more immediate experience. I have not seen a compelling replacement for the blog publishing platform yet and I still use and recommend wordpress for any of my clients looking to manage their own website for their business or organisation.

I keep hoping that Diaspora* will get up and running, so that we could all start playing around with that.

I know that some have given up with the blogging thing … but, once you wean yourself from the FaceHook and Twitter, well, you’ll find all sorts of time, I suspect.

I’m considering the idea of setting up a new site which is more of a ‘this is me and this my writing’ on donalmurphy.org. I think it might be time to separate out thegurrier.com and fold it into the other site. I have the new domain registered and some of the other wordrpress prep work done, I just haven’t had a free weekend to pull the trigger on the project. Another project for this holiday.

So in answer to your question don’t delete it just yet. I have plans afoot.

But yes! Sounds good to me. We have our border papers and special Southern identities all in order.