Social Networks

I'm usually one of the first ones to try out new technologies, but as of late I've decided to sit back and let others try things out first. Its not so much as that I don't trust the technology to work, I am tech savvy enough to usually overcome most hurdles, but I'm tired of signing up and starting things that disappear after you've put hours worth of work into them. It's frustrating, time wasting, and a headache, to say the least.

My bad luck started many years ago with AOL recipes. Being a single dad at the time and staying at home with the kids, meals were one of the biggest challenges facing me. So I turned to AOL, my ISP at the time, and found their recipes channel. It was awesome! No longer would we live off of Lunchables for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

For the next month or two, I searched different recipes, made menus, and spent countless hours inputting my own recipes. Then one afternoon I went to the site to organize the next week's menu, and guess what. It was gone. No warning, no notice, it was simply gone, with an apology that it ended so abruptly.

I was furious. I had not only spent hours upon hours working on it, I had also lost all the recipes I had put in since I didn't keep the hard copies and had deleted the old DOS program they were in.

The next time it happened was with Yahoo Photos. While they did give notice, and actually did a great job getting the pictures imported into a new service (short of losing your full size pics), it was still frustrating that they shut it down just a few months after they completely revamped the photo galleries.

Since my wife and I enjoyed the new format, we spent hours organizing, categorizing, and tagging our pictures. Then, in the blink of an eye, it was gone. Again, hours of our lives wasted.

Then fast forward to Yahoo 360. Again, after spending countless hours and days working on my blog, pictures, and friendships, we are told they are going to sans 360 in favor of a common profile with all Yahoo services. Could we really be this unlucky?.

There are so many different social networking sites that its impossible to be on them all. I have friends on at least two dozen different sites. So I pick the couple that I like the best, then stick to them and don't answer the invites for the others. I hate it, but I really don't have much choice. And when it comes to blogging and friendship networks, its impossible and ridiculous to try to duplicate your efforts over and over.