What drew you here to begin with? Why are you blogging here instead of Facebook, Tumblr, WordPress or Google Plus or even your own dot com website?
I want to know these things because I want to know what it is the brings people to certain places on the internet and not others. Let’s just say I want to gauge the impact of the site we’re building and whether it stands a reasonable chance against the others.
The community. I blog on every other site but the only thing that keeps me here and keeps me active here is the community.
My cousins and friends were on it so I joined. Now they are not here. But I still use it as my personal journal.
@suggestivetongue – But what drew you here to begin with? To try it.
i started using xanga because all of my friends used it. i still use xanga because none of my friends use it. i can say whatever i want without my real world friends getting a hold of it and getting offended. its like my go to rant site.
@roxics – My friend had an account and wanted me to join. So it was always about the people, really.
@suggestivetongue – @Your_My_Beautiful_Disgrace – @AmeliaHart – I didn’t realize so many people had real life friends that they knew on Xanga. It always seems like just a bunch of people that only know each other online.
When I ORIGINALLY started blogging on xanga, it was mostly to find myself. I know that sounds lame, but I’d just lost my ex to suicide and I didn’t really have an outlet for those feelings, so I came here. Now though? I stay mostly because I have friends I care about on here, otherwise the drama would have driven me away much sooner than it almost did. I rarely blog here anymore, but I have a few blogs on WP that I update almost daily. I like it there because I can write what I want without starting drama like it seems to happen here.
I don’t “blog” on FB for two reasons, the first being their notes platform sucks. I hate using it almost as much as I hate using word processing software, and that means a lot. The second (and possibly more important) reason is that I have a lot of family on my FB page, and most of what I have to say would just piss one or more of them off, and I’d just rather not deal with it at this point in time.
I used to cross post to tumblr from my WP blogs, but I haven’t done it recently, not really sure why. I have a button in my web browser that lets me do it without having to go to tumblr’s website, so its not like its all that difficult.
Does G+ HAVE a blogging platform other than blogger? If they do, I haven’t discovered it yet, and if not, I refuse to use blogger. It is one of the most infuriating blogging platforms I have come across, and it drives me bat shit crazy. I really can’t stand it, in case you couldn’t tell
so if you are planning on incorporating a blogging platform into your site, please don’t model it after blogger’s.
@DreamsEscapeMe – Thank you for your response.
Google+ posts are limited to 60,000 characters so most people just use it as a blog. It’s not really designed for blogging. But that seems to be the way a lot of people are going with it.
I’m curious, what do you not like about Blogger? We’ve designed our blogging features after Xanga/wordpress,
It was the cool thing in 6th grade. But now, I love how it is a separate world from Facebook. I only know 2 people here in RL. It’s nice to meet new people and just have another world of friends.
the social part, it’s totally different from facebook, which I detest. It’s amusing and entertaining when people know who each other are and how they think, and they mess with each other and they enjoy it, and then other people bitch about it but keep reading anyway, it’s entertaining.
weren’t you starting something new, how did that go?
I searched several blogging sites and liked the xanga interface. I think one thing Xanga offer that other sites do not is the fact that you can easily achive and retrieve your xanga entries. The best of Xanga however as mentioned above is that on Xanga you get more a feeling of community than on other sites.
My best friend from college and I joined Xanga at the same time. I stayed because of the community.
@roxics – Ooohhh okay. I have yet to use that for anything more than a status update on g+, so I don’t see myself using it that way.
As far as blogger is concerned, its mostly the lack of ability to be creative. They, in my opinion, have very boring themes for their pages, and they don’t offer a lot of choices, and I’m pretty sure you can’t really customize it the way you can with WP like a customizable header, different color options, and just more themes to work with in general. The widgets are sorely lacking as well, at least when I tried using blogger. Also, they automatically resize your picture, and its not that big. Maybe it was just the layout I was working with, but I prefer my pictures to be larger than what I was seeing.
They didn’t have the publicize option like WP does to automatically post content across several social networking sites at once, without having to copy and paste a link on each social networking site. Since I post several times a day and I’m trying to direct traffic as much as possible to my blog, I really kind of need the option to publish links to my content in several places at once, at least if I want to keep up with all of it. The publicize feature is going to come in extremely handy over the next couple of months while I’m moving. I can future post, and once the post goes live, the various social networks I have it set up to go to are automatically updated with a link, whether I have access to a computer at the time or not.
Even though I don’t blog here (or anywhere) anymore, I’m still drawn to this community for the reading material. Places like Facebook and Google+ pretty much just let you connect with people you already know (who may or may not be expressing themselves fully because of that fact), whereas here we’re mostly strangers to each other yet are encouraged to think critically and share our honest opinions about a number of topics. So by staying here, I’m exposed to a lot of viewpoints I might otherwise not be.
One might also argue that you could find the same sort of thing on an internet forum, but most of the forums I’ve tried have been full of trolls trying to outwit each other. At least here, the trolls are eloquent, and even their opinions are interesting in a way.
What drew me here was a friend… (former friend) he thought it would be a great place to vent and it sure has helped… what has kept me here since March is the people, the community… it’s the easiest place to Communicate with people and have people read your stuff.
Interactivity, feedback, friends. I like to be read and converse. Footprints and comment tracking features are cool. Privacy features. Xanga interactivity (some call it “community” – indeed I have) seems to be more dynamic and active, more inclusive by default, than many of the most popular sites such as Facebook. Facebook’s privacy controls default to limiting the scope of connectivity to one’s offline friends, an exclusive sort of arrangement. Xanga people and their reasons must be only a specialized segment of SNS users, though.
A lot of people in my church were here so I joined. Now they’re all gone except for me. I like the community feel here and the features they have. Pulse, reply, rec, tags, protected posts, etc,
no one knows me here
no one knows that i blog on this website. i have been on it for years. shhh!