Tied Up in the (World Wide) Web

If you’ve been online recently, I’m certain I can name one of the tabs or windows you might have open. I’m going to say one of them will be Facebook, and another one might be Twitter. According to statistics released by Facebook, about half of the users log in just about every single day. Twitter says they have about 145 million registered users, and a lot of their traffic comes via a mobile device.

I feel that I spend way too much time with my social media. I love Facebook, and it is constantly opened on one of my tabs. Twitter is usually next; with the newly updated layout, endless scrolling keeps me on for hours.

Luckily, there have been numerous posts out there made by fellow bloggers and sites that give plenty of tips to minimize your time spent online, especially when it comes to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Here’s a post made by Steven K. Griffin; I particularly paid attention to the Twitter category. Here’s another post, this time made on Becoming Minimalist, on how to minimize time spent on Facebook. They’re definite reads if you’re hoping to not spend as much time on these sites like I am.

Here’s a couple of my own tips that I’d like to add:

For Twitter:

• Utilize the List and Search/Hashtags functions. I have just recently started using Lists on Twitter, and it’s made my life so much easier. I can sort users based on their topics and who I know more personally. I don’t get distracted by the home page and don’t have to scroll through in order to find the Tweets I really want to focus on. Searches can now be saved on New Twitter; right now, I have “Internet addiction” saved for future reference. Hashtags have always been the easiest way to find something, so if you don’t use this nifty little symbol – # – I suggest you do!
• Try out a Twitter application for your computer/phone. Sometimes, I will use TweetDeck. TweetDeck puts my accounts up and allows me to Tweet to multiple things. I can also view saved searches, my mentions, and more as well. Ever since they began to integrate Facebook and MySpace into the application as well, it can become your one-stop-shop for social media!

For Facebook:

• The Ignore feature is your friend. I know it sounds very cruel and mean to hit ignore, but if one of your friends constantly uses an application like Mafia Wars or Farmville or something, feel free to ignore the application and those particular posts. That way, your newsfeed will be less cluttered and you can focus on actually finding something worthy for reading.
• Turn off Facebook Chat! I do this all the time (sorry friends of mine who read this …) because sometimes I just don’t have time to sit and chat about something. It’s a big distracting thing when I’m looking for someone’s post and all I hear is “pop pop pop.” Easiest thing is to click on the Chat feature, go to Options, and click “Go Offline.”
• Once in a while, clean up. What I mean by this is sometimes we “like” too many things or join too many groups or add friends we really don’t talk to. So one day, sit down, and tidy up. Remove friends from your list that you don’t talk to by going to their page and click on “Remove from Friends” on the left side underneath the sidebar. You can also go into Edit Friends under your Account menu as well. Applications, go into your Privacy settings, click on Applications and Websites, and remove the unwanted or spammy applications. This’ll get rid of friends whom you don’t speak to and applications you want nothing to do with.

Have any tips on how to effectively go through social media? Let me know!

What takes up most of our time on the Internet? According to a Nielsen blog post in August, three things dominate most of our time online (as well as a lot of time on our mobile devices): social networking, gaming, and e-mail.

E-mail is a pivotal part of the online world. Most of us technically use “webmail,” or e-mail that we get via a web-based e-mail service. A BBC News article said Windows Live Hotmail is said to be the world’s largest web-based email, for instance, followed by Yahoo! and Gmail, and has been constantly revamping its services to compete. There are so many different platforms out there that it’s tempting to sign up for every single one.

I’m very guilty of this. I technically only have three e-mail addresses that I constantly use, but I probably have more out there floating in cyberspace (maybe a couple of Yahoo! e-mail addresses and some old AOL ones too ..). Two of my e-mail addresses are based on Gmail, and one of them is based on Windows Live Hotmail.

Now, I know how easy it is to let e-mail just pile up and sit in your Inbox. My Hotmail e-mail address at the moment has about 1070 unread messages. It isn’t to say that I haven’t read them all or anything; I’ve scanned them all and have determined which ones are important for me.

How do I do that?

Here’s a little article written back in 2004 on the Harvard Business School site about how to tackle e-mail. I’ve taken a few of them that I find the most important for the everyday online user to know. I’ve also added some of my knowledge that I’ve been able to learn on my own.

1. Think of set times to check your e-mail. I only check my email a few times a day, usually when I first wake up in the morning, around lunch time, late afternoon, and then sometimes at night. By having these set times when I go on, I’m not obsessively checking my email and taking away from my productivity.
2. Utilize any of the filters/labels options that come with your platform. Seriously, I have never felt so relieved after I started using the labels and filters on my Gmail accounts. That way, my e-mail gets sorted into specific categories as it comes in. For instance, if I need to check on something for my JMC 305 class, there’s a specific label I have and a filter that I have for my professor so that her emails get sent to that label. It makes my life so much easier when I want to look at something specific.
3. Don’t tackle all of your e-mail at once. All right. This one should be the most obvious one, but sometimes it’s not. Let’s say you have about 50 new messages. You really don’t like seeing that you have unread messages in your Inbox, but trust me. Don’t tackle it all in one sitting. You’ll drive yourself nuts and you could also forget what e-mails you’re dealing with and which ones you’ve already handled. Do only a handful at a time. It’s better that way (for your sanity!)

Any other tips that you’d like to pass along, go on and comment! Good luck cleaning out your mail and start using web-mail more efficiently!

P.S. In terms of my challenge to myself to only use the Internet for work-based purposes, I failed. Oh well. My new challenge is to clean out my Hotmail e-mail and get it organized. Wish me luck!

Sometimes, I’m kind of glad I don’t always have Internet at my apartment.

I was sitting there at my table last Thursday, eating dinner and watching an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, a show that I wanted to rewatch ever since its run ended on Nickelodeon a while back. Lately, I have been able to watch 15 episodes over the past two days.

As I take a bite into a sugar snap pea, my Internet goes “local only.”

Let’s stop and do the math.

Wednesday I watched nine episodes. Each episode clocks in at about 24 minutes (the six extra minutes on TV would’ve been commercials). That’s about three and a half hours of my life that I spent staring at the screen of my 15.4-inch HP laptop. Those were hours I would not get back. Add on top of that the six episodes (another two and a half hours) that I watched Thursday .. the time management seems even worse.

I realized there, at my dinner table, that maybe I need to spend my time more wisely on the computer.

Instead of staring at the screen and watching a T.V. show, for instance, I could have not been online and I could’ve been studying for my biology course. I have the Powerpoint presentations as well as the book. I could have been reading my John Grisham book which I still need to finish. I have only gotten to the third story.

Many people get distracted online, and we all probably spend more time on a computer or an Internet-capable device (cell phone, iTouch) than we’d like to admit. According to a CrunchGear blog post last year, teens spend on average 31 hours online each week. Those hours were divided between instant messaging, YouTube, homework help, and some other .. ahem, activities (namely porn). Another post on Mashable a year ago says that the average person spends about 68 hours online each month.

Let’s just say that I probably spend close to double that amount.

Here’s my idea for the next week: try to spend as much time away from the Internet during the week. Weekends are kind of a free pass, but kudos to you if you can go without it for the weekend! The thing I’m trying to see for myself is if I can get away from the Internet for a little while. I’ll still go on but mainly to do my school work. It’ll be a challenge for me, as well as a challenge for you if you’re up to it.

(Sidenote: I’ve been writing this blog for about half an hour now. I connect to my apartment’s wireless network; no go. Oh well.)

Happy non-Interneting!

Let’s be honest: most of us cannot tear ourselves away from the world of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

I just so happen to be one of them.

There are tests out there that you can do to see whether or not the Internet is affecting how much you function. I recently took one of these tests that I found on netaddiction.com. Any score above 50, and the Internet is causing you some harm in your life. Any score above 80, and the Internet is messing with you – big time. My score ended up being a 65. For some reason, I don’t feel it was all that accurate. Despite that, I know the Internet has had quite the hold on me for a very long time.

My first encounters with the World Wide Web began in fourth grade. A friend introduced me to a website called Neopets.com – I was addicted instantly. From there, my addictions grew and grew, slowly adding in email, social media and blogging. Before I knew it, I would spend hours upon hours each day on the old, clunky desktop that my family owned. Sometimes I would be on there from 9 A.M. to 10 P.M., only stopping for food and restroom breaks.

It’s only gotten worse with the use of a laptop and other Wi-Fi capable devices that have entered the lives of a very connected person. It wasn’t until I began to read that the Internet could affect how one functions in the everyday world. An article by The Guardian in the United Kingdom a couple of years ago even deems it “an illness.” After reading this, I began to worry. Do I have an addiction? Do I suffer from withdrawals when I don’t have access? Will I need to go get enrolled at an actual clinic to get over this excessive use like reSTART?

Thankfully, I don’t think I need to go to such extremes – at least not yet.

I’d like to see if there are ways for me to slowly overcome being dependent on the Internet. Maybe I’ll try to limit my time on here by testing a program that’ll block my access after a few hours one week. The next week, I may try to quit cold-turkey and only get on when it’s an absolutely must. This is an experiment for me, and it could also be one for you.

I wish you good luck. Now let’s see if I can actually shut my computer down … (Nope. I can’t bring myself to it yet. There’s always next time.)