Some people have asked me to write down my thoughts on Google+ and explain why my post ratio on identi.ca has dropped off a cliff lately, so with this post I'm trying to make sense of what I think happened, for the benefit of everyone. Keep in mind that this is purely my personal view and largely born out of the simple fact that, unlike other people, I can only really deal with one social network in my life — I rather use one service a lot than split my posts up between two or three of them, I guess that's just the way my particular brain works.

As most people will probably be aware, I have been extremely active on several microblogging and social networking  services for years now. I started on Jaiku after Leo Laporte had mentioned that service on one of his shows and that is also where I first met Dan. Linux Outlaws was basically born on Jaiku and we picked up many fans there; I used to love that site. Then Jaiku was bought by Google which basically sealed its fate and it was killed by neglect. The site was still awesome and the community held together for a while, but in the fast moving world of the web, not improving anything about the service for over a year basically killed it. I played around with Twitter a bit but somehow neither the site itself nor the community ever fully grabbed me. In fact I still feel that there is no community on Twitter at all, it seems more like a load of people just pushing out posts and shouting at each other to me. With Facebook it was even worse, the whole thing started to actively annoy me very fast to a point where I actually closed down my account because I couldn't stand it anymore; what I want most out of a social network is intelligent and funny conversations and instead of that, Facebook constantly bombarded me with inane games, quizzes and lots of bullshit. As neither Twitter nor Facebook was doing it for me, it is no wonder that I jumped on identi.ca the moment the site opened to the public (and I mean that quite literally, as I am user #418 on the site). For the past three years, I have lived and breathed identi.ca and I loved every minute of it — I'm still the human with the most posts on that site ever. Linux Outlaws went from a mediocre podcast to one of the biggest in its field with the help of identi.ca and it's community and we made many good friends on there. I've stayed at the houses of people I had only ever met through the service, in other countries, too. That is pretty amazing, if you think about it. So as you can clearly see, I still love identi.ca and the people in its community very much. So what happened? Why have I spend the last few weeks almost exclusively on Google+?

Fab on Google+.

A very interesting read. I think Google+ is a great thing (and could possibly take over Facebook) BUT, I still prefer status.net for my daily communication. Twitter is also loads of fun; I have met many people on twitter, and I don't think I could leave.

Do read this and feel free to comment on the G+ thread linked at the bottom; I already have. I hope Fab stays on identi.ca.

We'll see what happens with Google+. I like the federation with statusnet. Google+ seems very centralized, like Facebook, but that's just me.

"Blogging is largely dead."

"There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write."

"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."

Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google's Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.

Blogging is not dead.

Stupid people SHOULD write. They will get better at expressing their ideas and maybe become less stupid.

Sheesh.

According to this article, I should probably quit blogging because I'm "stupid". Anyway, according to him, I'm sure.

Predictions like this annoy me. Like the prediction of "the year of the linux desktop" and the like.

Predicting stuff is stupid.

Certainly more so in the past, I’ve seen a select few regarding Ubuntu for “newbies, newbs, lamers” et al.  In todays Linux world I think this elitism exists only in rare circumstances.  Its completely silly too, just because Ubuntu wants to assist in setting up your system and get you up and running as quickly as possible does not make it “for newbs” I know many very experienced Linux users who favour Ubuntu purely because they have better things to do then mess about with their OS just to become functional.  Anyone can install proprietary drivers, its simple, but if Ubuntu takes that task away by automating the process, I’m all for it.  There was a time where I enjoyed the challenge of getting one of the more “exotic” distro’s functioning on my system, but now with several projects on the go, what I want in a new distro is to be up and running as quickly as possible.  I’ve deployed (and used off and on) Ubuntu since 8.04 and can happily say that this has always been the experience I’ve had.

This is one of the reasons why I use Ubuntu. Granted, there are always going to be issues with software ($deity knows that I have plenty of issues with Windows), but that's not always the underlying issue with the OS.

I guess I just want my blankity-blank stuff to work. Ubuntu "just works" and I don't have to mess with goofy drivers, or strange software, or anything else. Especially now, since I'm running hardware that was designed for Ubuntu in mind.

Anyway, I just want stuff to be decently configured so I don't have to spend a ton of time getting everything the way I like it. I used to spend lots of time "tweaking" my desktop, but now I'm more than happy with the default configuration of Ubuntu and Unity. Ambiance and Radiance are both beautiful and come with Ubuntu.