The thing about social networking is these days everyone has a profile. I’ve had my MySpace profile since 2003 and although I think I outgrew it years ago I won’t delete it. Why? I don’t know because I’m way cooler than all those 16 yr olds including BMOC who just learned of MySpace maybe a year ago and think they are SOOO cool because they 6354313543743 friends.
Of the 169 MySpace friends I can say that I know all of them*if* they are actual people and not a band of some sort. Are we all close friends, and do I really care if their dog ate their homework? Naa, not really but at the end of the day I don’t put anything out there anymore so I don’t really think of it as a connecting site like I once did. I don’t spam people’s pages with silly html graphics and I wince every time I hit a page that has so many freaking photo cubes, and songs that even on the fastest connections it takes 2 hours to load. No, my “Space” is nothing more than another website that every now and again turns up something of interest, normally only dealing with BMOC and or Smitten.
As far as other sites like Linked in, I have stayed away much more because of the X-factor as opposed to the actual idea that other people are able to link to me in a professional manner. I can see the usefulness of it; I’m just too afraid to give away too much of where my life is these days to venture out and create a profile.
FaceBook on the other hand I have avoided like the plague. Why? I can’t give you an honest answer. I mean for the longest time I had everyone on MySpace so why complicate things with another social site that just links me to the same people I’m already connected me to, right? OH boy was I wrong. As my friends on MySpace started to disappear to FaceBook I finally took some time to set up a profile. I figured what the hell. It even have a nifty feature that allows me to feed this blog, something I haven’t decided yet to be a good or bad thing. The first two weeks on FaceBook I found school friends. I mean elementary school friends, and WOW that was great. I mean there are a couple that I really excited to see and know they are, but just like with MySpace there will be others that we linked because it felt like the right thing to do. Yesterday morning I decided I’d spend some time going through my email addresses and reconnecting with the masses. The people whose day I really do care about. The people that in some way mean something to me, and who I truly do care and want to know are happy even when their kids just spit up everywhere.
What really proved the POWER that is social networking is that I found a co-worker totally at random who knows people whom I’ve known for many years thanks to knowing another friend. When I was surfing profile and ran by her name I really couldn’t believe it. Here was one of the people I see every day, genuinely like and slowly but surely am getting to know better as time goes on and now I could peek inside of her non-work persona if you will. I mean if she accepted my friend request. It was totally crazy, but also very exciting to see the pictures of her and her friends, her boyfriend, and all dressed up for something other than staring at a computer screen all day which is what we all look like around here for the most part. Ya know unless one of us wakes up and just feels the need to be pretty.
It took me a bit to warm up to the idea of FaceBook because again, I’m OLD SKOOL MYSPACE, YO! However, after a little time on the site it’s obvious to me why so many of us “old” folks have moved over and are actually enjoying the online interaction again that was lost so long ago when MySpace became a place for html spam, and profile overloads.
