the 63,206 character long facebook post (and google plus still sucks)
For the observant, you'll notice I don't have any link to my G+ page anymore. Nothing bad happened there, save for one thing - nobody gave a crap about it. I didn't delete my account or profile, but I did blank it should it magically happen that G+ becomes the "in" social-web thing... which I seriously doubt.
What I've done concerning my social-web crapola is center it around this blog and Twitter to make it easy both for myself and for people that follow me.
On the home page of my site, you'll notice I have a dirt simple Twitter feed at top that shows the latest 7 things I posted there. I don't remember exactly when I installed that, but it wasn't more than a few months ago. And even though that feed is only on the home page and nowhere else, those little updates are getting clicked regularly, so that's cool.
I follow what happens to social-web stuff, and one thing in particular that's happening is something known as Facebook fatigue, which is another way of saying that more people are getting sick of Facebook in general. And the deal there is that people aren't getting off FB and running over to G+. Instead, they're just using social-web stuff a lot less.
The quick fix is the best fix
You can divide social-web crap into two camps, that being short-form and long-form.
Twitter is short-form and purposely limits you to 140 characters each time you post something.
Both Facebook and Google Plus are long-form, where you can write at length when you want to. Both systems allow posts where you could blast out tens of thousands of characters if you wanted to. Facebook supports a maximum of 63,206 characters per single status update, and I'm assuming G+ allows the same if not greater...
...but who wants to read 60k+ characters in a status update of all things? Not I.
When you want to "go long", so to speak, you get a blog. With social-web crap, long-form just doesn't work. Why? Because you're not being social at that point. When you have a spoken conversation with someone, does the first person ramble on for a half-hour and then you can reply? Of course not. People talk in short sentences so they can, y'know, converse.
Here's what a 63,206 character long Facebook post actually looks like at 25% of its original size (if I actually posted it in original full size it would crash some web browsers).
Yeah. Kinda dumb. Really, dumb, actually. If you want to talk about fatigue, that's fatigue.
If you want to see it in a slightly larger size, go right ahead (edit: imgur deleted it, oh well), but it's still dumb. 🙂
Anyway, the point is that absolutely frickin' nobody wants to see long stuff like that when doing the social-web thing.
I find Twitter for short-term and the blog for long-form to be a good solution overall.
