For me, social media started with MySpace. That company was founded in 2003, but I remember in 2005 when everyone started getting in on it. I remember the heyday of MySpace, the heyday of Twitter, the colossal failure of Google Buzz, identi.ca (which still exists), Bebo (which AOL dumped), and of the present social-flavor-of-the-moment, Facebook.

The only social media I post updates to with any sort of regularity these days is my “fan page” on Facebook. And the only reason I do that is because it makes sense to use social web in a 100% public way. I don’t even bother posting anything “only for friends” anymore, because if I want to post something for a specific audience, I text it or email it.

Google+, who just started rolling out vanity URLs, is just too little, too late. Every time I mention how much of a ghost town G+ is, there’s always somebody who says it’s all sorts of wonderful – on Facebook. Can you smell the irony there?

I used to post a lot of “status updates” all over the internet on various social media services, but these days all I do is the fan page thing, my personal blog and YouTube. That’s it.

The trend these days is that there’s a line being drawn bewteen what I call “personal social” and “product social”. An example of personal social is Facebook. An example of product social is Pinterest (now open to all, by the way).

It’s my belief that the future of social web will be product social, and personal social will go the way of the dodo. Why? Because product social allows you to actually talk about things of interest, whereas personal social is basically populated by nothing but attention whores.

Do you post to social sites like you used to? Or are you one of the many thousands that do the “Yeah I have a social account but I only use it like email and never post any status updates” thing?

Incidentally, if you are the type who likes to post product reviews, but couldn’t care less about personal status updates, you are one of many who would be happy to use product social sites.

If for example NewEgg took their product review system and actually developed it into a social community, it would be a roaring success because techies love talking about their tech. And what better place to do it than from the place techies buy tech from?

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