Social Networking is bad for Blogging!

Or, maybe I should say,  too much social networking is bad for blogging.

Contrary to what is widely said in the blogosphere, I have begun to feel that too much social networking can hurt you in the long run as a blogger. Of  course, social networking has an important role to play for any blogger, yet sometimes it begins to consume too much of the blogger’s time that blogging is affected.

Most bloggers join social networking sites as a way to promote their blogs. But, when they explore the site, they make new friends and find new things to do on these sites, resulting in the blogger’s losing focus of their main goal – Blogging. 

Blogging started out mainly with people maintaining a web log of their activities, where people were satisfied with merely putting their thoughts on the Internet, without much care of who, or how many, were reading what they were writing. But, as usually happens, human beings have a tendency to get caught up in numbers, and soon people were worried about numbers like page views, google PR, Alexa Ranking etc, etc.

Networking sites came as a blessing for the new blogger as they provided him with the means to provide the much needed exposure for his blog. But, as more and more networking sites begin to come up, they had to find ways and means to attract the blogger and keep them there. So, forums, chat boxes, contests etc. became the norm for most networking sites.

And we, the bloggers, fell into the trap.

Already we were spending quite a lot of time on the Internet, and on our blogs, and now one more thing was added to the list.  This began to affect not only our blogging but also our lives as we begin to spend more time on the Internet.

Thus, the networking sites have a definite role to play in the development of a blog, yet too much of it can hurt a blog. What are your thoughts on the subject?