Four days in to my abstinence. I have to admit that I have been craving to log in to Twitter. I’ve found myself checking standard news sites like cnn.com and foxnews.com with more regularity. TechCrunch and Mashable have for sure seen a lot more of me recently. Before, I had my twitter feed up all day long and I could glance over to get a quick feel for what was going on. I’ve read through a ton of articles in the last few days and have thought, “I wish I could tweet the link to this article.” I’ve thought about people that I really only know from Twitter and wondered what they’re up to. I’ve missed seeing blog post links from friends and I’ve missed even the simple “I’m eating lunch” type of tweet that anti-twitterers complain about. I’ve also noticed that every time I have a thought like these, I then realize it used to be followed by some amount of time scrolling through the feed either on my phone or in an app on my laptop at work. I’m wondering how much time I actually spent racking up almost 5000 tweets.

Foursquare – I’m done with it. Don’t miss it, don’t expect to find any reason to miss it over the next week and a half and can’t think of a reason why I’d start using it again. There’s just no pay-off in checking in to hundreds of places and earning badges that don’t mean anything at all, while at the same time letting everyone know where I am and that I’m not home. Maybe if a huge number of stores and restaurants were offering specials for mayors or check-ins, that at least would be a reason to think about using it. So I’m done with Foursquare…why can’t I get myself to delete the app from my iphone….

Facebook – Still confused. There have honestly only been a couple of times in the last few days when I thought about opening up the Facebook app on my phone. I still see using the account in primarily a damage control way (I can un-tag photos that I don’t want shared, etc), but I read more and more articles every day about how Facebook is becoming the central hub of the internet. Whether that is a good thing, or bad, remains to be seen. In the mean time it definitely creates an argument for holding on to the account just to see where everything goes. And if nothing else, it’s the ultimate contact list for friends, past and present. So my forecast right now on Facebook is I’ll probably lock down all the privacy settings and hold on to the account. I guess we’ll see how I feel in 4 more days.