while i applaud the general spirit of the blog post, cringely's examples don't exactly make sense.
on the one hand he is admits to signing up for 'spam' newsletters to keep a pulse (is this because it's useful or more obsessiveness?). but he also says that too much spam makes email not useful.
then he says that he will never sign up for third party apps on facebook. what about the pulse? what if they're useful?
i don't get what his personal experience is trying to say, but i do think clogging is an interesting phenomena. companies make a lot of crap and are often motivated by getting user attention and thus the bottom line, rather than truly helping users. then again, different users want different things. one man's newsletter is another man's spam.
I thought he was saying the lesson he learned from signing up for all those email newsletters was that it was a waste of time and ended up clogging his inbox. He won't make the same mistake when using social networks like Facebook.
I use HN and twitter a lot more than facebook. Facebook's best use for me personally has been sharing links with friends, and when I go to X city I can click on it to see if I have any friends there.
I paid someone in India to delete all Facebook wall posts for about $40, and then I removed all of the people I don't talk to anymore. It feels pretty good--gets rid of a lot of crap I wouldn't have been interested in seeing or reading anyway.
Aside from that, my Facebook usage has declined quite a bit and I don't really feel like I'm missing anything. I do hang out on HN a lot though ;)
"...NEVER accept an invitation (even if I actually end-up attending the event)"
Strange, considering that the events feature is one of the most useful on Facebook, and because he has obviously used it (albeit inefficiently) since he's noticed events this way. Really, Facebook events are great for parties and things when you can't get everyone together at once to plan/discuss/whatever, (or when you're antisocial like me and you don't want to). A lot less phone calls and such to mess with, and a built-in discussion board and RSVP system to boot.
