I came up with this in reply to a post by spunkywulf, but I think it's worth editing it for broadcast:

It seems I'm still posting away on Livejournal even though the trend of the Internet is now going towards smaller and smaller communication, from 140 characters down to just clicking on a "Like" button for things and spreading them around. I started this journal as part of a group of international friends that wanted to stay in touch with each other after a year at university, so posting actual decent-length life updates to each other was really the idea, and though I'm writing about just about anything that interests me these days, I haven't stopped the habit of actually... sharing my thoughts.

It took me a while to understand the intended purpose of Twitter and the like, which wasn't so much an equivalent to what I'm doing here as a sort of universal chatroom where people don't need to be signed on to immediately receive individual lines. I tend to have the Clickteam chatroom open in the background during the day, and they tend to get little thoughts from me that wouldn't make full LJ entries - no doubt, if that wasn't there I would feel the need to inflict those on Facebook or Twitter instead. But I realized when looking at up-to-the-minute Twitteralike coverage of the E3 presentations how meaningless this way of communicating made everything, if it's just dumped out to the whole Internet - I was looking at a hurricane of tiny reactions with no further thought or context to them at all. By contrast, the posts about the same subject by the people I know who had taken time to actually sort what they were going to say out before discussing it and telling people what they thought were much more useful to read.

Some of the people who started journals along with me have moved on to Facebook, or Twitter, or using Facebook as a Twitter. And I still sort of know them and what they're doing in their lives in general, get the occasional news link from them in the swarm of voices bouncing for attention on the front page, and so on. Some use both the piecemeal update type sites along with a fuller journal, so it's not exclusively one way or the other - what I'm saying is that it's the people who actually share their lives and their thoughts, whether they're people I've met in real life or not, that are the most fascinating and wonderful people I know. I really do love you all - thank you for being interesting!

If you're reading this through my RSS, front page, or Livejournal, that is. If you're reading this through Facebook... well, you're not, are you? It is, after all, more than twelve words long.