Overnetworked (Now with 100% more Twitter!)

I’ve said from time to time that I wasn’t going to join Twitter.  It turns out I lied.  https://twitter.com/jimchines  This is entirely the fault of my publisher, who have their own Twitter account at @dawbooks.

I’m officially at the point where I’m overnetworked.  I think I’m going to try to balance this out by closing out my MySpace page.*  I don’t use that one, and this way I can pretend I’m not adding yet more online timesuckery to my life.

I don’t know how much I’ll be doing with Twitter yet.  I understand that social networking is the Big Thing, but I find the more I try to do, the more … diluted I feel.  Trying to follow everyone on LJ and Facebook and my Google RSS feed already means I find myself skimming most entries.  There are days I realize I’m more intent on “catching up” than I am on actually reading or interacting with folks.  Twitter looks like it has the potential to make that even worse, especially since a lot of the people on Twitter are folks I’m already reading elsewhere.

For the moment, I’m only following people on Twitter if I don’t already read them on Facebook and LJ.  Hopefully I’m not violating any Twitter etiquette by not automatically following everyone who follows me.

We pause now as Jim reboots the computer, losing half the blog post he had composed.  Grumble.

I’m probably overthinking it all.  I’ve got two goals, the first of which is to be accessible.  If someone wants to check out my web site, great.  If they prefer LJ or Facebook or Goodreads or whatever, no problem — it all gets mirrored there.  Goal #2 is to keep in touch with my community — other writers, readers, fans, and randomly cool people.  Oh, and it would also be nice if I could still do things like write the next book, see my family, keep the day job, and so on.

Hm … maybe if I signed my kids up for Twitter, I could–

Ahem.  Anyway, how do other folks handle it all?  Do you use one site differently than another, or is it all basically the same stuff in different formats?  (I do like the @ and # functions in Twitter, from what I’ve seen so far.)  Help a Twitter newbie out here.

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*Does anyone use MySpace anymore?