In early summer 2007 I spent a month traveling across America with a bunch of complete strangers. It was an amazing experience and one I think I’ll always look back fondly upon.

The funny thing is it clearly had some kind of effect on me and I returned with some kind of social media mania 🙂

In the weeks and months that followed that trip I started blogging properly (my first post is here), signed up for Facebook (and dragged an awful lot of my friends into that – hope one day they forgive me!), joined Twitter (and have been addicted ever since) and also signed up to Kiva (where the $50 I added that first day has just contributed to my 11th loan.) I’m sure there were many more sites I signed up for (I was a proper Beta-slut back then) but I think its interesting that the services I signed up for back then (if you include WordPress) still dominate my social media use today.

[weirdly though I actually joined LinkedIn in 2006!]

I’ve been pretty dismissive of alot of social media services that have come along since but maybe it is just laziness because I have so much time and effort tied up into these handful of places.

I’m determined to give Branch and Medium a proper try out – I have no idea if either if really worth the hype or if I really even understand what the hell they are actually offering [I thought I understood Branch and really liked the idea – though I’m starting to think I dreamed that version of the product!]. Google+ seemed like it might have worked for me but it never really captured my imagination, Pinterest makes zero sense to me still and app.net can go whistle for that 50 bucks (I’ll invest another 50 in Kiva before they get my cash..) so it has been quite a while since I clicked with something new