Social media is vapor

If you’re reading this post in 2021, there is a good chance you found this post via social media. If you’re reading this at some point later, you probably didn’t — at least not from a social post of mine. My posts about it have come and gone, just like millions of other posts every day.

I wrote my first post on this blog nearly 17 years ago, and moved to WordPress on May 24, 2004. There’s no reason to think it won’t exist for at least 20 years more. There are no guarantees, of course, but it seems feasible.

Social media posts, as you know, have a very short life span. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but something you always need to consider. When I first started this blog, Friendster, XING and Myspace were the top social channels. Any content I had published on any of them is long gone by now.

What will the landscape look like 20 years from now? It’s hard to know. Even so, while sites like Facebook and Twitter keep most of your posts forever, finding old posts can be very difficult. Even if they still exist, your older content will be difficult to find.

Still, be social

Social media can be great. While this blog has comments, interactions are fairly rare, and are served much better on a social media platform. If you want to share ideas or news with your friends, social media is excellent.