social network | Family Man Librarian

On the way to work this a.m. I decided that I would pull the plug on the majority of the social networks that I’ve participated in. This includes Facebook, MySpace, and some others including Twitter and LinkedIn. I’m not going to go into the reasons why except to state that they are many and varied. Generally, though, I find participation in them to be more of a burden than a benefit. From now on I intend to focus on this site and this site alone to participate in the general social network of the web. I’m sure it’ll cost me readers and traffic but oh well. If you want to keep up-to-date with what I’m doing, subscribe to this blog because that’s the only place that I’ll maintain for the foreseeable future.

Last night I discovered Facebook. I know, I know, it really isn’t anything new of course, but somehow I had never taken the plunge and created an account there. I have had a profile on MySpace for a few years and because I thought the two services were two halves of the same coin, I thought I’d just be content with MySpace even though I hate most things about it.

What a surprise. I actually like Facebook. And in Facebook, I actually have a lot of friends. By that I mean that there are many more people whom I know from one thing or another on Facebook and not on MySpace.

What does all of this gain me? I’m not sure, really, except that it feels good to join networks of people whom I know, and also I get to see or find out more information about friends than I would otherwise. For instance, I got to see lots of photos of friends, Ashley and Paul, that I hadn’t seen before. And another friend had lots of photos of his little baby boy that I hadn’t seen. And I can also see friends’ birthdays.

Obviously there is such a thing as too much social network stuff, and you can easily overload yourself. One way I found out this afternoon that I can reduce the risk of overload is that I figured out a way that my blog postings here can automatically be posted in both MySpace and Facebook without any extra work on my part. Automatic crossposting. That’s cool!

So…If you use either social network and are interested in adding me as a friend, please let me know. My Facebook profile is at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=552938337 and my MySpace profile is at http://www.myspace.com/murphymoose. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I have a profile in LinkedIn as well.