Social platforms. What are they good for?

I’ve been chased out of Facebook twice over Facebook’s privacy flaps. I’ve left Twitter once, and then gone back. I’m about ready to leave again over advertising in my time stream. I tried Instragram, staying nearly a year, before deleting my account the end of May. Why? Changes in how the stream presents itself, ads, and the fact it’s just another property of Facebook. My Flickr account has gone dead because of the chaos at Yahoo, and how everything changed on Flickr as well. Even LinkedIn, the social network for finding work, has reached a point where I want to pull the plug on it, primarily over its sloppy security (see “How LinkedIn’s password sloppiness hurts us all“).

That leaves me with Smugmug, VSCO (barely), my WordPress blog, and my presence on Google+. I came so close, so many times, to just junking Google+. But it looks like, as a process of elimination, that I may just wind up on Plus because that’s about all that’s left, and it’s not like everything else I mentioned that I’ve dropped. Who would have thought I’d turn to Google+ in the end? Certainly not I. And there’ll be more to come…