Evolving usage habits on Google and IM networks

For the past six years, if I needed to find anything on the internet, I have always used Google. For news and stock updates, I have consistently used Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance. But lately, I noticed that my web surfing habits have evolved.

If I wanted to find anything technical, I first go straight to Wikipedia. If I can not find what I need on wikipedia, then I do a more general search on Google. For news, I now first go to Digg and see the relevance of news articles based on rankings submitted by other users. With Digg, I find that I now read less and less of news articles sent to me via my subscribed RSS feeds. As for financial news, that has not yet changed as I still go back to Yahoo! Finance. I think the reason may be that the investment portfolio that I track is only configured on Yahoo! Finance. Also, it might be that I have no reason to use an alternate or more sophisticated finance web service.

For Instant Messenger communications, most of my friends and co-workers are on MSN Messenger so that is what I use most often. I do have friends on Yahoo! Messenger but they are pretty distant friends (I really just meant geographically guys...). Now that the MSN Live and Yahoo! Messenger networks are interoperable, I have un-installed Yahoo! Messenger from my PC. I do use Skype but I only start the Skype client when I need to reach someone or when I am expecting a Skype call. Otherwise, I exit the Skype application completely - I do almost all of my talking on my mobile phone.

I am not really the Myspace generation and I have no reason to use Friendster for the purpose of dating. Yet I find that I increasing tell my friends "if you want to know where I am or what I am up to, just check out my Myspace and Friendster pages". The rationale may be that I want less annoyance from my friends, or simply that I do not want to unnecessarily spam my friends about my daily musings. But it is an intriguing evolution on the means and modes of communications.