Livre d'Or

The communications strategy thing sounds like a really good idea. I really like the overt acknowledgement that different channels work for different people and different use-cases.

I'm a bit more willing than you to use FB if that's where my friends are, but it's extremely imperfect and I wish they weren't. I think I should in fact try emailing people anyway, even if they're more FB people than email people, in spite of your bad experiences with that method.

I had the impression you had a little circle on LJ, I didn't realize you were only really connected to rysmiel there. I do read, and I should probably comment more because you've been amazingly good at giving me second chances when I screw up. But equally I'm not the people you're actually trying to keep in touch with.

I have lots of admiration for your professional blog, but it makes sense that it's more about curating your identity than about interacting with people. I keep thinking I ought to have more of a professional / wallet name presence and I can't quite manage it because I'm totally addicted to the feedback of getting comments on my posts.

I also think you're really good at Twitter, you're really good at expressing yourself pithily without getting lost in quotidian detail or swept up in group outrage. And yes, on a good day Twitter can work well for conversations about something rather than just general keeping in touch.

Tumblr I'm fairly sure isn't for conversation. I can't imagine how I would use it as a way to keep in touch with friends.

Interesting that you positively like planned phone conversations! I can do with the right people, but a lot of my friends hate phones and a lot of my relatives don't really want to do the planning thing, they want to phone me randomly and get annoyed if I'm not available whenever.

Being expected to be on chat at work would be really tough for me, I'm not surprised you don't want to do that in your personal life as well. And yeah, any synchronous channel is going to suffer from the time zones issue, much sympathy.

Cross country moves: when I moved from Oxford (my undergrad institution) to Scotland I had absolutely no strategy, and some of the people I thought would be friends forever just dropped out of my life and others I totally wouldn't have predicted made heroic efforts to keep in touch.

Then a year later my then sweetie moved to California and that degree of long distance pretty much killed the relationship. We did try, but she never really liked email and the only way we could speak on the phone was if she called me at ~1 am, and I wasn't exactly at my best for being a supportive partner then. Also she wanted daily contact minimum, preferably multiple times daily, whereas I generally do better in long-distance relationships where I get to have my own life as well as time with a sweetie.

I moved to Sweden just at the peak of LJ (2006), so even though I'd emigrated I found it pretty easy to keep in touch with everybody. That's what I really miss several years on, if I'd moved anywhere other than back to England this time round I'm fairly sure I would have ended up like you, feeling I'd gone to the moon. And indeed my friends from Sweden I sort of kind of keep up with on FB, but it's FB, so it doesn't really work.