MyLastGoodTwitterFaceFlickrReadsBook

As a person of a certain age, the whole "social networking" thing, i.e. using the isolation of a computer to connect with other equally isolated people, seemed just a bit off. Over the years, though, various attempts have been made, some more successful than others, and I've slowly found myself drawn into these little devils. In no particular order, here are some of the places where I can be found:

MySpace - Probably the paradigm of the social networking space, and I can be found here in a few places--both as myself, and as someone named "Incorporation for Artists," plus of course "Zen Noir" can be found here as well. Not to mention Sergei from "Outta Sync," a character I played in a movie. (Distressingly, Sergei has more friends than I do!) The thing that bugs me about MySpace, though, is how busy it is. Sure it's nice that you can skin the appearance of your profile page, but those skins can get so involved--not to mention all the YouTube videos and music tracks that autoload and all the rest of it--that the page takes forever to load. My own sister's page has so much stuff on it that it (a) loads verrrry slowly, and (b) scrolls even morrrrre slowly, so that I almost never go there anymore because it's just too annoying.

Facebook - I resisted Facebook for ages because I'd already been on MySpace for about two years and couldn't for the life of me see any reason to be on two sites that accomplish nearly identical things. But a couple months ago I relented, and was rewarded with a fantastic immediate dividend: a great friend of mine from high school, Shannon Chamberlain (nee Walker), happened to search for my name just a few days after I signed onto Facebook. We reconnected after way too long, and as it happened I was about to go for a visit to Miami, so we were able to get together almost immediately. And, of course, it was one of those things where the years fell away and we almost instantly dropped into the same old delightful groove. This immediately made me into a huge Facebook fan. Since then I've found a bunch of people from college as well, and it just seems to work better for finding and connecting with people. Plus, the profile pages aren't skinnable, so the pages load much faster (my sister's page pops right up). On the other hand, those thousands of mini-apps can get seriously overwhelming--I'm constantly being sent "flairs" (little virtual buttons with pithy little aphorisms), or internet hugs or karma, or being invited to become someone's virtual feudal vassal, or being invited to take a quiz to find out which Shakespeare play I am. I drew the line at a vampire game where a friend of mine virtually bit me. Sorry, vamps are right out. Me no likee vampires. They scary.

Twitter - Okay, this one I just don't get. It's like microblogging, where there's a fixed limit to how many characters you can type at any given time. I think it should be obvious to anyone who reads any of my blog entries--I am just not that sort of writer. I like to luxuriate in language, to set the words rolling and see where they go. (Marc Rosenbush, on the other hand, is a minimalist--this is why he and I are good collaborators when we write together, because our approaches to writing are perfectly complementary--and he gets the Twitter paradigm immediately.) But more importantly, almost no one I know Twitters at all, so there's next to nothing to draw me there on any sort of consistent basis. I've written a grand total of three entries since joining, always without any enthusiasm. The sort of self-involved navel-gazing that Twitter seems to promote just doesn't fit my personality--the only person on earth I can think of who might care to know what I've been doing twenty times a day is my mom. But she isn't on Twitter either, so why?

Flickr - Then there are the sites that focus on social networking built around one particular activity. Flickr, for instance, is about photographs. From time to time I take pictures off the computer and put them on Flickr. Sometimes I put them there in order to post them here, but it's also nice to invite family members so that they can check out pictures as well. Nothing spectacular, but I understand what it does and why, and it's simple to use.

Goodreads - This one is all about books, so naturally it's a little closer to my heart. The site is labor-intensive--you have to enter each book you own one by one, and in my case that's a boatload of books. I've only entered a little over a hundred, which make up just three shelves of one bookcase--and I've got eight bookcases. (Not to mention the books that are literally piled across the top shelves of my kitchen cabinets.) But the idea is that you enter your books, record when you read them and maybe write little reviews, your friends do the same, and that way you can all share stuff you liked or disliked. (For example, when my friend Melissa Klein was about to read Thomas Cahill's "Gifts of the Jews," I was able to tell her why that had been my least favorite of the Cahill books, then once she too had read it she told me why she agreed with my assessment.) For a book lover, the appeal is obvious--for someone who isn't, this one may seem like a waste of time. Fair enough.

Last.fm - Like Goodreads, except for music. The great thing is that this site isn't labor-intensive at all: I downloaded a little application that simply watches the songs I play and records them on the site. So I get stats about which artists I play most often, plus there's a handy internet radio station component--if I'm traveling and don't have my iPod, I can log onto Last.fm and play a station that already knows the kinds of music I like. (It's actually quite good about picking songs I legitimately enjoy.) Very cool.

Okay, that's it, I'm tired now and am going to go do something else. Like sleep, maybe. For which there are no social networking sites at all, and let's all be grateful for that.