I was visiting with my sister justkimu on my way back to the Midwest from North Carolina at Christmas and we were telling her girls why LJ was so much better than facebook. Ironically it was the things that Facebook touts as making it the best social network that we were pointing out as it's downfalls.

There was a time when my day started out with a fairly long post to LJ every morning. I knew it wasn't just a journal...that other people would be reading it and that I cared about what people had to say. Contrast that with facebook where I'm mostly just posting photos or short quips or complaints and it doesn't matter at all that it won't be a semi-permanent record I can look back on.

The people I met on LJ I got to know and consider real friends. I've got about 165 friends on LJ still and I've met about half of them in person. I have over 1100 "friends" on Facebook and I'll probably never meet most of them and to be honest there are many that I don't care if I will or not. Yes Facebook has allowed me to catch up with some old friends that I probably never would have lured to LJ and that's nice. But the vast majority of my time on Facebook isn't spent keeping up with those folks anyway.

The reason I stopped posting to LJ so much was a co-worker saw me posting to LJ one day and reported me to one of my former bosses who was a micro-manager from Hell and I was told not to use LJ at work. That screwed up my whole routine and after a couple months I just developed new routines. But I really miss writing more extensively and reading more in depth about my friend's lives. Posting photos to communities and getting feedback and writing about my Spiritual journey in my Shamanic community.

So I'm trying to re-write my routines a bit and push back from the constipation that is Facebook.

Peace,

Wander