Imagine seeing all of your classmates from high school for the first time in years, say at a class reunion. You’re excited to hear about what everyone’s been up to and share what you’ve been doing, even to the people you weren’t that close with. After an hour or so, the party starts to get old, and you revert to talking with the group of friends you’ve remained close with for years.

Social media is far too often like that class reunion. After first signing up for Facebook or Twitter, we rushed to find and add every single person we’ve ever come into contact with. After a few weeks or months, we started to get overloaded with news feed and information we don’t care about. Many of us still have to sift through thousands of updates to even find a couple that are relevant and worth reading or engaging with.

From day one, social media handed each of us a megaphone. Facebook, Twitter, and even Tumblr have allowed us to broadcast everything to our entire network and the public, whether they care about what we have to say or not. Instead of being able to post meaningful information and funny anecdotes to people we know will appreciate them, we publish information, thoughts, and pictures that only a few people honestly care about to the entire world. Sharing with anyone and everyone still has a lot of value when building a personal or business brand, but what if you just want to update the people you care about?

What’s shared with a group of friends is probably not what you want to share with grandma. We don’t want to share everything with everybody. This phase of social media’s growth is starting to become something of the past as it grows and matures. Although no social network has successfully addressed this issue, there have been several that have tried, including Google+ with Google circles. The concept was great, but having to create and manage each and every circle of contacts was time-consuming and made something that should be easy, difficult.

Snapchat, as an example, exists because we want to share specific messages and information with a small number people. It’s simple, uncluttered, attractive and private, and allows users to control who sees what. There’s a reason that Facebook is losing users and support to competitors — they’re still stuck with trying to give everyone everything at once, and the result is a confused and cluttered mess. They have adjusted their news feed several times only to get further away from a solution than keeping results time-based.

Our time is too valuable to waste. If you have to scroll down a page for 30 seconds just to find a post worth reading, you’re wasting your time. There comes a point in time when social media will evolve from a time suck to a more valuable communication tool that works with our lives, not waste it.

Facebook isn’t going anywhere, but there are opportunities for social media apps and services that give users less. After all, less is more :p.

Whether you want less or more out of social media, we welcome you to give Postly a chance to be the tool you use to stay posted on those you want to keep in touch with and share with who you want to. It’s simple and lets you control what you see and who you share with. Put down the megaphone and get smarter with how you use social media.

See what Postly is all about. Or more importantly, what we’re not about (likes, crowded feeds, ads everywhere, etc.) Sign up for Postly.