[KrisAndrew]

I gave up on Twitter several months ago. I never really got much out of it. I also quit using G+ after I stopped playing Ingress. Facebook is time-limited to 1 minute per day using the StayFocusd extension in my browser. I've also created email filters that send all social network notifications to the trash.

And that's the folly of most of these social sites. They send you so much data that it eventually becomes a cacophony, and you just want the noise to go away. Instead of searching for notification settings on the respective sites, it's far easier to filter emails (it takes me 5 seconds to create a filter in GMail).

There's a very fine line between meaningful engagement online and annoying nagging. I can see why Facebook is focusing on chat apps, because I think they've discovered that having a social network that is, at its essence, a layer on top of email is a losing prospect. A chat app is a channel outside email that isn't easily dismantled by a filter.