Rose Tinted Googles

Yes yes, I am still a terrible person, with updates about as frequent and reliable as your average public transport of choice. Part of it is, as is ever the excuse, being busy but I won’t lie and pretend it’s not my fault for being rather neglectful of my blog again. So, I’ve given myself a little motivational kick up the arse by updating my What Have I Done portfolio pages, taking out much of the excess stuff and streamlined the whole thing. Whereas before I mainly used it as an absolute repository of all my writing, good and bad, I’ve rather more sensibly now whittled it down to mainly show the most recent stuff I’ve done that I don’t absolutely hate – with the option to obviously chop and change as I choose as time passes and I start to dislike pieces and like other ones according to my inconsistent whims. As ever, I am always still looking for writing work, so here’s the obligatory request to take a look at my Who Am I page for details or indeed use any of those fancy-looking-honestly-and-not-at-all-pretentious icons on the top right of the page (sitting on the bottom right of the banner) to grab me to write for you, should you so desire.

One of the things that you may have noticed I’ve added to the top banner is a link to my Google + profile. My personal thoughts so far is that I can see how it might be useful, I’m just not entirely certain how yet. Most people that seem to be using it well, and as such providing me with the most reason to stick with it, are those using it as a halfway house between a Tumblr and Twitter. I can certainly see how the lack of character limits helps in that respect, and I also see how it’s slightly more accessible to social interaction than Tumblr is, not least because many people already have Google accounts in one form or another. As much as the Circle thing is a neat idea, I think the execution is still slightly flawed at the moment – as Tom Francis rightly pointed out, the people I want to share things with are not necessarily the same people I want to hear everything from. I definitely agree with not necessarily wanting to read all the comments on the post of one person who’s stuff I do enjoy reading from people I don’t know taking up all the space in my feed.

I think at the present time, I’m mainly going to use it as a more ‘professional’ social network than a personal one – which is what I use Facebook more for. It’s probably somewhat ironic that I’m separating my social networks into essentially the ‘circles’ that Google wants me to sort my online acquaintances into, but for me I think it just makes more sense and is more useful to me to use it to see and read interesting stuff – and carry off conversations about – subjects that can’t quite fit into Twitter’s 160 characters, hopefully slimming down the number of multi-tweets I end up doing otherwise. It’s already proven very useful in terms of fixing my website recently (thanks to everyone that helped in that, incidentally) so I’m willing to wait and see what happens and where it goes. Feel free to add my Google+ profile either by clicking the button at the top of the site, the image in this post, or if you’re super lazy, right here.