Horay!  I went back on Twitter yesterday, after my self imposed month off social media that actually just ended up being a month off Twitter and Facebook..  Yeah, I know, pretty useless really - but it did open my eyes to a few points:

• Avoiding social media is nigh on impossible these days - you'd have to leave the internet as we know it to make sure you didn't see any social media in action
• I don't have to keep using Twitter or spam myself out there to get business, in fact, I got more since shutting down my lifestreaming - although this could be down to actually being free to be approached for business for the first time.
• It's easier to "hear" what other people are saying when you shut up yourself (I might have to implement this to my offline personality too!)
• Twitter is brilliant, and I missed it a lot
• Facebook is really "over" for me, although I am going to keep my profile afterall, as a bucket for all my connections, and it's very useful for the groups - in fact that's the one aspect of it I'd say no other social network site does as well at all
  
• Plaxo Pulse is my new interest, but nothing on a par with how Facebook first caught me
• I met my long term friends more often
• I had to write a hell of a lot more email to keep in touch with people

I also gave up drinking in January - and no, contrary to how that sounds (and what I expected) it wasn't actually a boring month!  I am hoping to cut back on my drinking to next to nothing over this year.  I have had a couple of drinks in the last week but really missed feeling as clear headed as I did when I was long term sober, so I'm going back to not drinking from today, for at least another month.

All in all I'd say the experiment was a really useful exercise; if nothing else it's shown me how completely ingrained social media has become in today's internet, and how much more information you can gain automatically from being wired into the communities and embracing social web trends.

Right, I best get off and invite all those people I culled from my Facebook.  If they'll have me back...!