While at BarCampLondon3, I noticed there was little discussion about Facebook. This is unusual because everywhere else you go, its all about facebook. I first thought it was the influence of being in Google, but actually no. I mentioned it Rachel Clarke and she reminded me that that BarCamp is made up of people who are really in the know, the people actually doing stuff and not just talking about it. Facebook was put into its real context at BarCampLondon3 rather that most conferences where's its over hyped or talked about to death.
Anyway one of the talks I did go to talked about friends lists and how artificial they really are. One of the points which really got me, was the notion of old friends which drop off the radar. The speaker asked how many im buddies to we all have compared to how many we actually talk to? I looked at mine afterwards and saw I have close to 250 im buddies across 6 im accounts (3 jabber, 1msn, 1aim and icq, 1yahoo). Its time for a clean up. So to simplfy things, I'm sticking to just my cubicgarden gmail one and maybe my ian forrester jabber.org one. If you want to talk to me on any other network (except skype) your out of luck now sorry. But it doesn't really matter, you can still email me on facebook.
Some may say this stupid or even brave, but the face was that looking at the gaim logs, most of my talking was done over the jabber network and my msn/aim/yahoo friends to be on facebook anyway. Also Miles mentioned to me today, that you can send messages via other jabber servers on to other networks now. I am tempted to im everyone on the other networks and say I'm moving but why bother? I like to think of this as uncluttering my im list using network effects. This is also a great time to do this, as having my phone im client running up to 4 different im accounts was frankly stupid.
Technorati Tags: im, barcamplondon3, barcamp, jabber, xmpp, friends, facebook, gmail
