Nick Carr quotes Ryan Carson on social software:

I just don’t have time to use all of these amazing apps, and I’m guessing you might not too. I’m a fairly typical web citizen. I’m 28, married, make a reasonable wage, own a house and I have a few close friends. You’d think I’d be a web app company’s dream, but I’m not. How come? I’d love to add friends to my Flickr account, add my links to del.icio.us, browse digg for the latest big stories, customise the content of my Netvibes home page and build a MySpace page. But you know what? I don’t have time and you don’t either.

I think I have to agree with that. I started using del.icio.us about a year ago; I stopped after a few weeks, because the extra effort didn't seem worth it. Heck, I only just started using technorati tags in my blog posts recently, and I've had support for it in my posting tool for awhile.

The current mix of social software seems to me a lot like the last big fad, which centered around services like LinkedIn. Other than responding to other people's requests for a link, I haven't had anything to do with it. The bottom line is, these things take effort to use. Not tons, but effort. It's simpler to just not bother.

I'm sure that some people find these apps useful and compelling. I'm not one of them though, and I'd guess that most people aren't.

Technorati Tags: social+software, tagging