I don’t do New Year resolutions. Honest. I mean, it’s just one more day and a public holiday to allow us to nurse our hangovers in peace, right? Still, I know plenty of people do them, but if you think you’re going to make yourself over, you’re in for a rude shock. Instead, I’m picking a few minor changes to make with realistic goals that I think will improve me overall.

There’s no doubt that social networking is both useful and fun. But it’s become a bit of a hodgepodge of interconnected services that overlap, never find wide-enough traction to be useful, or are just plain dangerous. I’m not going into another rant about what I do and don’t like — this is about personal preference. I am, however, going to clean up my act and start walking the walk.

Facebook

The big one. I’m going to spend January on a self-imposed exile from Facebook. Somehow in the last 12 months, it’s gone from photos of parties, weddings and babies to reshares from irrelevant celebrities (whose posts I suspect are largely ghost-written), and pages like “I fucking love fridays, like if you agree” (see to the right; I suspect are largely spam farms). All of a sudden, I discovered that I wanted to know what my friends had for lunch today. Wasn’t that the point? To stay in touch and keep up to date?

I also had a couple recent run-ins with the way FB handles privacy. While I’ll admit an amount of user error, the service actually makes it easy to screw things up. Rather than risk further stuff ups, I think that it’s definitely time for me to put up or shut up on this. However, before I jump ship there are things that I need to do.