Socially Inept Networking

Some time ago my boss wanted me to get involved in Social-Networking
sites. He said this is where the marketing of the present and the
future is taking place. I prefer the telephone myself. Oh oh, one
more time where I have to enter a world I’m not familiar with.
School was the other world I was not familiar with. I do know how
to use a computer to do many things, but putting my life up on an
internet billboard is not one I was ever moved to do. Does this
mean I’m going to have to join MyFace or SpaceBook? Hey, who I am,
what I like, and where I’m going is none of your business. Or is it?

People seem to want to tell everyone else what they like these days.
I understand that young people spend more time online than off it.
In fact more and more people seem to have more friends they’ve never
met than ones they have, including me now! I wonder… When people get
addicted to the internet, do the support groups hold online meetings?

Being an older person I thought I should do my homework first (Wikipedia). There are well over 300 sites listed as “notable” social networking sites. Those are the popular ones. On the other hand only 14 sites are listed as defunct. Those are awfully good odds. Sounds like a good business to be in. According to eBizMBA as of February the top Social-Networking sites are Facebook with over ¾ million users, number two is Twitter at over ¼ million, and in third place is LinkedIn counting over 100,000 members.

Interestingly Pinterest has moved up a couple places to the fourth
most popular site just behind Linkedin. What I find interesting
about that is Pinterest is mostly a site of images or at least
appears that way to me. One site I really enjoy is Pearltree. In
Peartree you place any kind of information you want, logs, blogs,
or images, you name it, everything gets placed in little pearls
that when created remind me of a binary tree in computer science
or nodes in graph theory in higher mathematics. And in Perltrees
people can join together and create their own community of stuff.

Anyway, if you haven’t figured it out yet, I know nothing about
Social Networking. But hey, I’m learning! Now mind your own
business. Oh wait a minute…… did I just post this on MyFace?