Is there such a thing as too many social network memberships? MySpace lets you add friends and share your interests. Facebook, Friendster, and Multiply, among others, do this as well. They integrate games and various applications to make the experience more fun. Then there's LinkedIn where members share professional information with friends. Then you have StumbleUpon that lets you share sites that you like with your friends and other members. And then there's social network sites for news like Digg, Reddit, and Mixx that allow you to share news sites with others. Twitter comes in to provide their members with a medium to either amuse or annoy their followers. People you follow would sometimes display flashes of brilliance in 140 characters or less, but most of the time, it's just trivia. The question isn't really the question that needs to be answered. The real question is, "do you have the time to maintain your numerous memberships?" Furthermore, how active would your participation be to be considered an active member? On average, I'm posting entries about once (or twice) a week in my blog. Writing an entry for my blog usually takes me about half an hour or more to do so. Most of my time is spent on my freelance gig, website development, among others, which rounds up to about four to six hours. If my workload is pretty light, I'd open up FeedDemon and catch up on the feeds I subscribe to. Reading feeds would usually take me about half an hour (I just skim through most of them). I also have to spend some quality time with my son, lest he forget I'm his dad. This usually takes about an hour or two. Eating breakfast (or dinner, whichever your time zone is) usually takes another hour. So for me, it takes about six hours to do some website development, play with my son, and (lightly) surf the Internet. And all this is during the day, when I get home from the office where I pose as a training developer at my other gig. This other gig takes up my nights, nine hours per. I would probably be scrambling for training materials to develop, improve and/or update, which equates to me not really doing anything for myself, simply because I can't. Eating, or snacking, is the only exception. In a 24-hour cycle, about six hours in the daytime goes to my freelance gig and my son, and nine hours goes to my official job. That's about 15 hours, give or take. Then factor in travel time, which fortunately for me takes about an hour going to and from the office, I get 16 hours. Then I add the time it takes for me to eat dinner (or breakfast) and prepare to go to the office, which usually takes about an hour and a half, I get 17 and a half hours. Simplifying things, I spend 17 and a half hours in the waking world. That means I get about six and a half hours of sleep time. That is when I'm lucky. So do I still have time to poke my friends in Facebook, update my status in MySpace, accept and invite friends in Friendster, write a good review for a site and recommend it in StumbleUpon and twit something sensible in Twitter? By the way, I still haven't added the time I spend on trying out beta services and products, debugging my WordPress Themes and Plugins, and researching new products and services that would help me be more productive. I also haven't added the time I spend on learning PHP and other programming languages. I'm amazed that I still have the time to smoke. My answer would then be yes, there is such a thing as too many social network memberships. I've said goodbye to my MySpace account, and canceled one of my Friendster accounts (I'm keeping the one with my wife). I will be canceling my Digg membership, together with my Facebook and Multiply accounts. I'm keeping LinkedIn (for professional reasons), Twitter (for its simplicity), and StumbleUpon (for its massive traffic generating potential). If I have accounts with other sites, I'll be canceling them also, as soon as I remember what password I used for those sites. So those who were connected to me in the sites that I will be canceling, keep in mind that it's not you, it's me.