Getting geeky again

Social media are in turmoil, and I’m riding out the storm. Not to be too dramatic or anything, but a lot of cheese has been moved around, and I’m trying to cope.

First off, Google disabled the social aspects of Google Reader, likely to send us all scurrying to [Google Plus] https://plus.google.com/117370192660207004661/posts.¹ So the little things I shared in Reader and that showed up magically in the sidebar have vanished.

Then trunk.ly, my link-saver of preference since del.icio.us went all kiddie, was bought by … del.icio.us. It may well be that this eventually ups the game at del.icio.us but I'm not going to hang around to find out. I went and signed up to Pinboard, which I should have done when del.icio.us first hit the skids. In the end it was the business model that appealed to me: pay for something you want/need. In other words, I -- rather than some advertiser -- am the customer. I’m still exploring the power of Pinboard, but in the meantime one clear good thing is that the links I choose show up magically in the sidebar.

That still leaves a couple of things. Facebook has said it will no longer pull in posts from blogs. Does that matter? I'm not sure. Over at the other place some discussion does take place on FB that never gets back to the mother blog. So should we ask people on FB to come on over? Or should we just post links to each blog post as and when it happens? Probably the latter. Same for G+.

The big, existential question remains, of course: why bother? To that I have no answer. Because I can? Because I want to? Because ...