dealing with dangerous changes

I have felt the brunt of some stuff that's happened on the internet recently, and it nervously makes me wonder what direction it's going.

On March 30, Facebook rolled out the new Timeline layout and forced everyone to use it. Shortly after that, people started posting less on my Facebook page. A lot less. Conversation slowed big time. I warned my Facebook fans about it in advance in the hopes they'd stick around because I knew that Timeline would tick off a bunch of people, but that didn't help much. People just hate Timeline and wish it would go away. Facebook really shot themselves in the foot on this one. My fan count hasn't dropped nor have people 'unliked' my page or whatever but the lack of conversation now is really obvious. Timeline is just that bad.

Also in March, Google laid down the boom and forced everyone to use the new YouTube interface. The result is almost identical to what happened to Facebook where people are commenting a whole lot less.

Last month on April 25, Google laid down another boom and rolled out the Panda update to their search engine. Spammy site owners whined big time about this, but they'll get over it. The changes Goog did do not adversely affect me in any way, but this is yet another instance where Goog is burying what I consider to be the 'real internet' into the background. I remember a time when Goog used to provide really good search results that pointed to forums and whatnot so I could get the info I was looking for. But these days all I get for results are almost exclusively retail sites looking to hock products at me. More often than not I have to dig at least 2 pages deep on Goog search results to actually find what I was looking for. Sometimes I don't even find what I was looking for at all. It's getting to the point where I may switch to searching with Bing exclusively, because at least that engine isn't constantly trying to hock crap at me I don't want nor need.

On another note, I've blanked out my Twitter profile (yet again). Twitter just sucks. It's only used by spammers and celebrities. For almost every "tweet" I posted, spam happened with @replies. And internationally speaking, nobody really cares about Twitter outside the US. Given my international fan base doesn't use Twitter at all, I don't know what I was thinking by using it, so I dumped it. Again. The only thing I may do with it is what I did before, and have new YouTube videos auto-posted there.

Strictly because Goog has such a hard-on for people to use their G+ profiles, I may start posting there, but in a specific way. I'll be using my personal G+ profile because Goog still doesn't offer vanity URLs for pages and probably never will. That's stupid but that's the way it is. Oh well. Anyway, I just posted my latest bloggo there recently and will be posting this one there also just to let Goog know I'm actually going to start using their G+ thing. Goog really really REALLY wants people to use their G+ profiles, so I guess I will and see how it flies. Who knows? Maybe I'll get listed as a 'featured content' or something. That would be nice.