social media overload

Happy Easter everyone. I hope you had as good a weekend as I did. The weather was perfect in Southeastern North Carolina, and we actually had some pretty good surf. I went out for a few hours yesterday and was very rejuvenated. The water temperature is approaching 60 degrees, and it feels pretty good once you get used to it. Anyway, thats not what I want to talk about.

Isn't it amazing how things have changed in just a few short years. Everyone is twittering, facebooking, Linkedining, and whatever other social media people use. I think this is pretty cool to an extent, but who agrees with me that it can be a bit overkill. I love the internet and all the capablities that it provides us, but I don't want to know what everyone thinks about everything they encounter during the day. I wonder if the world will ever get tired of being too connected. I use Active Rain and Facebook, plus a number of other more static web sites. Active Rain is a fantastic media for professionals to network, express opinions, and post information to potential customers and clients. Facebook is awesome to keep up with people and to mass communicate on a somewhat more personal level. To me, that seems like a pretty good amount of web activity, but I get invitations daily to confirm that I know someone on some new social networking site. I don't think I could keep up with much more, and still be productive in other areas for my business and personal life. How much is too much? What's the formula for effectively managing the overload of social media?