Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

« iPod GenerationsMainObnoxious »

Networking

433 words

The has been a lot of buzz about those 'social networking' sites in the past months. And they made it from terribly en vogue to passé in that time. Even Wired (the first and possibly only issue of which I bought in the U.S. last week) lists wired: quitting Orkut; tired: quitting Friendster; expired: quitting Six Degrees.

[Read a rant about a particular Microsoft ad present in that issue of Wired.]

Now, I didn't think too much about that 'social networking' thing to begin with. Mainly because making it work would mean that I'd have to enter a lot of 'good' data and many other would have to as well. Knowing that most people will enter poor data and most well-adjusted people won't do this kind of thing at all, makes this a pretty useless exercise: I don't need to become a member anywhere if I want to get to know new people who are geeky or even obnoxious. I could just take a walk around my department and talk to the people I've ignored for the past two years, say. So there's not much a future in this.

Another downside of this is the whole giving-data-to-other-people thing. Probably all those companies are in the U.S. or countries with even poorer data protection records. So I'd rather not give them any information about which they'll surely convert into spam sooner or later. If I want more spam, I can simply read my junk folder. Thankyouverymuch.

This doesn't mean I am not intrigued by the idea of being able to see the 'degrees of separation' (say, to reinforce may theory that any American is at most one degree of separation who has, via relatives or the army, connections to Germany) or even graph things and do analysis with them. It's just that I'd like to play around with the information myself and that I don't expect anything than a few hours of geeky entertainment to come out of it (which of course others would label 'deep insights').

Finally, there is a practical question: A friend recently 'invited' me to join such a web site – I guess the fact that they send the e-mail with your friend's address helps a great deal towards making it past the spam filters. Now how should I react? Politely join although I think no good will come of this? Surely it was meant to be a nice gesture. Quietly ignore it? Send an angry e-mail that my good e-mail address is not supposed to be given away? Currently I am in favour of the second solution.

April 1, 2004, 11:29

Add your comment

« iPod GenerationsMainObnoxious »

Comments on

Photos

Categories

Me

This page

Out & About

pinboard Links

People

Ego-Linking