I’ve been working on that notepad in my head on a future post.  It has become a more urgent project of late,  because I feel a lot of what Leo has expressed here.  I too jump onto many shiny new services,  convinced that this is the one that will make the Web more truly social,  and help me to find the online community I’ve always sought.

Some of Leo’s thoughts:

A little deeper investigation showed that nothing I had posted on Buzz had gone public since August 6. Nothing. Fifteen posts buried, including show notes from a week’s worth of TWiT podcasts.

Maybe I did something wrong to my Google settings. Maybe I flipped some obscure switch. I am completely willing to take the blame here. But I am also taking away a hugely important lesson.

No one noticed.

Not even me.

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.

Buzz Kill : LOL: The Life of Leo

What Leo said there in that last paragraph of the quote above expresses well what I’ve been feeling.  No one can hear over all the shouting.  I post things,  and it scrolls by on people’s streams and is gone.  People (including  me)  have almost entirely stopped using their RSS feeds,  and so the only two places where my blog posts notifications get anywhere near the attention of others is through the Tweet plug-in that I use with WordPress,  or on Facebook through the import there.  But both Twitter and Facebook have such large streams (ala “all of our friends”,  and people have hundreds of them ,  even thousands)….the stream engulfs them all. 

And the marketing glut of unwanted, unsolicited “followers” has worsened many times over. 

I love it:  “Screw you, Google Buzz” says Leo as he scolds Google for taking his content that he’s entrusted to them and dropping it.  I even noticed it a few days ago, Leo.  I saw an absence of posts there and wondered if you had just lost interest in Buzz.  Maybe you have now.  Or maybe you just want to let them know that you’re pissed.  I am too. 

I resonate with the things Leo goes on to say here:

But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place.

I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more. I’m sorry for having neglected you Leoville. From now on when I post a picture of a particularly delicious sandwich I’m posting it here. When I complain that Sookie is back with Bill, you’ll hear it here first. And the show notes for my shows will go here, too.

Social media, I gave you the best years of my life, but never again. I know where I am wanted. Screw you Google Buzz. You broke my heart.

I am,  in a sense,  gratified that this was Leo’s experience,  because I’ve been hesitant to say anything  about this bubbling of “Social-Media-topia”.  I frankly felt much more in touch with more people 8 years ago when it was just blogs that made up the bulk of the Social Media landscape.  Blogs and RSS.  Dave Winer can rightfully say “I told ya so”.  It was on Dave’s blog software (Radio Userland) that I ”cut my blog teeth”.  I was led by Radio Userland to discover the RSS universe,  and it became my morning paper.  I still like the role of Twitter as a recommendation engine from my friends about what they are reading and “liking”.   That’s why I thought it important to tweet my blog posts,  so that people knew when I had something more substantial to say about the content I had selected to share. 

So thank you, Leo,  for helping to lift this veil of silence. 

(Note,  I found out about this from the tweets of Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer)