I wrote a year or two ago about my feelings regarding social networking on the internet.  Basically I feel very unmoved by all of it.  Venues you seem to hear about most are MySpace.com and Facebook.com.  There is also one that is different from the rest named Twitter.com which I happen to appreciate more than the others.  The difference comes from Twitter only allowing you to post 140 characters. That’s it – short and sweet.  If you care you can follow my mind-numbing posts there at ‘twitter.com/rondoyle‘.

I guess some of you may like a definition of social networking.  It is simply people posting what they are doing, saying, eating, pondering, working on and watching on TV (American Idol seems to be a big topic of discussion lately).  Then other people can read and comment on what they have shared.  Back in the pre-computer days I think this was called writing in your diary or journal. Of course in those days you would not allow anyone to read such intimate, boring nonsense.  But the times, they are a changing.

So back to the main thrust of this column, I have also started playing with Facebook.  I had an account a couple of years ago and just never used it.  Being a geek I sign up for many things to test when they first come out but don’t go back to many of them.  I restarted my Facebook life a month or so ago and still feel pretty much the same way about it with one or two exceptions.

First, using Facebook has allowed me to find old friends (and many have found me) from college and even some of my old high school buddies – from back in the 70′s.  They are now living all over the world. A buddy from high school now lives in Australia and another in Tampa, Florida.  An old girl friend found me who has been in California for over 20 years.  Don’t tell my wife about that one!  Well, OK you can. She has a Facebook account, too and has already seen her.

I am starting to use my account mainly for storing photos so that friends and family can see what we have been up to over the years.  This is a good feature but I just don’t find the informational part of it that interesting.

It is appealing that you can let only your “friends” see your Facebook pages so this keeps strangers out of your life.  Feel free to look me up and give it a try if you like; however, you have to sign up for a free Facebook.com account before you can find me by name.

Let me know if you use it now or start up soon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 4:39 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.