A recent article on our attachment to social media got me thinking about my most commonly used services and their relative importance. The goal is to answer the question of how I’d feel if various services suddenly disappeared. After going through this process it feels as if these services moved from being necessities to feeling like luxuries. They either have a substitute that will do what they do or only have value due to the network - clearly these are important but I just have no attachment to the product itself.

• Facebook: I don’t care much for it and at a certain level I want it to disappear. The best reason I use it is the only reason I use it - everyone I know is on it.

• Twitter: I enjoy Twitter and use it more frequently than Facebook but don’t think I’d feel the loss terribly. I use it as a content source primarily and in the end the stuff I’m interested in can most likely be found via Hacker News.

• Hacker News: Years ago, I remember participating in the discussions but lately I’ve just been using it as a source of news. My current use case would be taken care of via Reddit or any other tech news aggregator.

• Foursquare: This would be the biggest loss but purely from nostalgia. I started using it when it launched and saw it evolve through the various products. I’m not a fan of the recent split into Swarm and Foursqare but still suspect I’d be most upset if Foursquare disappeared.

It’s sad that I feel so cynical about the apps and I’m trying to understand why. I suspect part of it is that the novelty of these has worn off and part is that there’s so many new tech products out there that it may just be overload. We’ll see how I feel about them after the next five years.