"It has been argued that social media has become far more than a convenient way
to stay in touch with friends and family."
For the most part I do agree with this statement. In a way, it's almost become a nuisance to some degrees. For example people posting status updates on Facebook just to annoy or even hurt another person's feeling, even multiple people's feelings. Then there's all the drama that ensues from this, and this is the main reason as to why I avoid Facebook as it is entirely too easy to stir up trouble on. Even a simple change as your relationship status can stir things up. But this is old news, and the easiest ways to avoid the drama is to either unfollow the person or just to not use Facebook entirely.
There are other methods for keeping in touch with friends and family such as: Skype, MSN, Steam and tumblr.com. Skype will connect you to your friends and family with voice calls that are of better quality than most other programs. While it does provide a text chat feature, its primary feature is voice calls. MSN, is primarily just for quick text chats. I'm not too fond of the amount of ads on it though. And then there's Steam.
Steam is an amalgamation of different social media techniques. There's the user's profile page in which you can place comments on, view the persons gallery of in-game screen shots that they've taken. Maybe even view some of their Workshop items that they've created for certain games, voting up the ones you like in hopes of them being placed in the game. You can even vote up games to be placed in the Store via the new Greenlight feature. You can track what achievements your friends have been getting recently and even join in on their games every now and then should you choose to. Point being that Valve tends to try and add new ways for users to interact in interesting ways.
