I’m finished with Facebook, and believe me, i’m not alone. Everyone I know hates the strange stuff in their Facebook streams, partly from “friends” we don’t remember or care about, or from brands who want a relationship with us.
Problem is, I am also somewhat bored by all the alternatives. I hardly visit Twitter, except to scan it for breaking news and people’s obituaries, just like older people scan the daily paper. Of course I also dutifully visit LinkedIn and Google+ once a day, but they don’t excite me either. The former is full of people marketing themselves, and the latter is noisy no matter how much I try to tune the filters. I used to spend hours on all of them. Now, not so much. And last semester, my ASU students admitted they were over Facebook,too.
In reality, I feel social networked out. My community of social media friends, too, has scattered. We were the early adopters. Now things have settled out, and the journalists have gone to Twitter, the VCs to their own blogs, the social business people to G+, and of course my distant cousins and my brother remain on Facebook. I’ve tried Path, which many people like, but most of my family will not try anything new, and many people on it never post content.
So when I heard on The Gillmor Gang that Keith Teare, who has been watching the web since it’s beginning and who was part of the UK’s first Internet cafe and Europe’s first ISP, launched a new social network, I was less than thrilled. What could be left to do?
Nevertheless, I dutifully downloaded the early version of the app, because what would life be without new toys?
After about a week, I have decided there was indeed something left to do: aggregate everything and tune out the noise. Just.me allows you to share publicly, by email, to Twitter, FB and Tumblr, or privately. It also allows you to upload any form of content: photo, video, voice, text. So it’s very flexible. It hasn’t even launched yet, but I bet it will have Google+ and LI sharing, too, after a while.
As of now, almost no one is on it, so I read the river, which allows me to see gorgeous photos that express the countries and cultures of Just.me’s early adopters, who are global. When I am on the app, I don’t feel as if I have to share, but I do post photos. I have the same sense of discovery and delight that I had when Twitter and Facebook and G+ were all new and I could meet new people and see new sights — without ads.
Of course Keith will monetize it eventually, and it will “scale,” — meaning self-destruct with the entrance of the marketers. But for now, Just.me is like finding a quiet room to have a conversation in the middle of a huge noisy party.
