Open Thread: Social Network Fatigue?
Over the weekend, there was a brief flurry of blog activity because some of the popular kids decided they’d had enough of Facebook because they were too popular and couldn’t handle all the activity (no, I’m not going to link – if they can’t manage the traffic, why make it worse?). This led to some broader discussion of social network fatigue. It seems that some people find the social networks – Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, or what-have-you – to be such a burden that they get overwhelmed and need to drop out to reclaim their lives and retain their sanity.
There are many reasons why this can happen. Perhaps people lose sight of their original goal in joining a network, and start treating it as a competitive exercise in collecting the most “friends” without regard for any actual value. Perhaps the lack of tools for organizing and prioritizing the traffic in most social networks makes them harder to manage. Or perhaps the social network is just the pet rock of this decade and people are moving on to the next trend.
But perhaps the problem is overblown, and it’s only a few web celebrities who can’t cope with the price of fame? That’s why we’re asking you, dear readers: are you experiencing any social network fatigue? Have you pulled back or dropped out of any of your networks? Or are you still happily networking, whatever angst the A-list may be indulging in this week?
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I’m 26 and am a social networking dropout. Once I got a life and a girlfriend (who I met on myspace, incidentally), I just don’t have time to leave people useless little messages or share pictures of myself making funny faces on a site that is about 100x worse than flickr for sharing photos.
I guess I also grew tired of how much work it became to tell the world about the intricacies of my relationships with family and friends. I started to realize that was some info that was better kept private, and that News Corp, Google, and Facebook don’t need to know.
Social networks are fun enough, but they can be an enormous time-sink if you let yourself get too involved with minutiae. You need to strike a balance between what you want and need out of the network, and how much of your time it should take. Like Justin, I don’t have time to leave continual “junk content” — nor do I care what my friends are up to every 5 minutes of the day. They can read the stuff they want to know in my blog, or we can even use (gasp) the phone!
My company has a large and active network on Facebook, but I’m not entirely sure that it gets used to transact much business. There’s probably a lot of information about oneself and one’s private life that need not be posted for all 30,000 of one’s co-workers, either.
Twitter and the like are fine for me, quick and simple. I cannot see a burnout for me, personally, in these types of ‘social networks’ (I don’t believe they are).
Facebook, Linkedin, MySpaz etc. are a different kettle of fish entirely. They require some kind of time-commitment, and simply put – time is valuable. If you don’t get an acceptable return on your time (be it new clients, existing client updates, or fun/enjoyment) don’t bother.
My 2 pennies worth!
With the numerous sites that are cropping up daily, I see many co-workers that were already lost in the world of instant messaging being drawn deeper away from real work with postings to social networks.
I am all over them but find that if they offer a RSS feed I can then import that into Jaiku and still have one place for friends and my blog readers to go.
I still run my daily blog and only peek at new sites to see what they do but fall back to one or two key ones to keep my sanity.
No Burnout here. I check MyBlogLog every day and the rest once a week.
BeachBum
Talk about angst. This post seems like a reactionary bit of fluff from a frustrated blogger. I honestly have no idea what the big issue is and the fact that you offer no extra information about the subject doesn’t help. Why not expound a bit, otherwise it just comes off (to me) as whiny. Am I being too harsh?
I’ve not got burnout, because I didn’t really get sucked in in the first place. I have a social presence on LiveJournal, a professional one on Linkedin, and a personal hobby one on WordPress.
Facebook, Myspace, secondlife etc I’ve avoided like the plague, as I’d much rather actually go out, meet people and do stuff that keeps the three I’m on fed with interesting information. Internet Celebrity? No thanks!
I don’t get network fatigue because I run my own social network :) It’s just like anything though you have to have a balance. I will say however that it gets annoying everytime you login to MySpace you get a hundred friend requests… it starts to become just like SPAM where you just ignore everything because it takes to much time to wade through it all.
I use Facebook for communication and updates from old and distand friends and (ex-)colleagues and I use LinkedIn for finding business contacts (and being found) as well as getting updates on the wereabouts of ex-colleagues.
I don’t have my wife, kids or close friends in either one as they are people I get to see every day.
I can’t even bring myself to login to my myspace, facebook, etc. accounts anymore, because I feel obligated to respond to people, read their comments, accept friend requests, etc. The whole thing is just irritating. I run my own site, with an ever-so-old-fashioned forum and communicate with friends there. “Social Networking” is a dying trend in my opinion. It will evolve to more localized and real circles and communities.