To sate my growing dissatisfaction with Facebook, I’ve been plumbing the depths of other social networking opportunities. The scope and variety of these services is all over the map. Some of them are wonderful, but some of them excel at showing how disgusting human beings can really be.

I’m going to skip over Twitter. I just can’t get into it. I try, but it’s basically a rehash of information posted elsewhere. Apparently my feelings are shared by others in humanity as Twitter hasn’t really penetrated the social networking market beyond its core group of users.

On the positive side, I think Reddit is my favorite. It shows all the stuff I like from Facebook, and typically shows it a lot earlier. Reddit is faster to load, better organized, plus it allows me to avoid things that I don’t want to read, such as the political nonsense that my Facebook friends spew on a regular basis. Reddit is cool.

My son loves 9gag. It’s just a stream of funny or interesting pictures, GIF animations, plus some adult stuff, which you can easily avoid. 9gag is for fun.

Pinterest is a photo-sharing website, but categorized. It’s pretty decent, and a lot easier than doing a Google Image Search for stuff you like to look at. For example, I’m into Egyptian art, and Pinterest has been really satisfying.

I’ll confess that both 9gag and Pinterest are photo-oriented. If you want to chat, you check out other sites or mobile apps, such as Skype or Snapchat or Instagram.

Now on to the awful stuff.

If you want to video chat with random strangers, one of your options is something called Omegle.

No, I’m not supplying a link.

Omegle is pronounced oh-ME-gull. I suppose it could be based on omega and oogle, as in the last thing you want to see before you die.

So how is it chatting with random strangers? GROSS! It’s nothing you’d do in real life, well unless you’re stuck somewhere with someone you don’t know and you’re feeling gregarious. Otherwise, it’s just weird. Specifically, it’s perverted. If you just want to chat with an anonymous stranger about the weather, go elsewhere.

I would say all of the video chats I saw were of men fondling themselves. Many of the chats were obviously robots steering me to sex sites. I only chatted with two real people who didn’t want to show me their privates: One guy asked if I was a woman, and that was a short conversation. The other person was pretty nice wanted to know how to say certain things in English. A better website for that activity is Lang8, but at least that person didn’t flash me their tallywacker.

As far as other sites go, I’m sure more are out there. I had to stop after my Omegle experience to take a break. I may pick up my Facebook alternative quest in a future blog post.