Around every ninth e-mail I receive these days is asking me to join or become "friends" via some online community…Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Grouply, Yaari, etc. Half of these are requests from people whose names I don't recognize…or sometimes, I'm not sure if it's who I think it is. I just got an invite to connect on one network with someone named Dave Schwartz. I know four different people named Dave Schwartz and have no idea which of them, if any, this is. Maybe they can all get together and start an online community where everyone is named Dave Schwartz. I'd certainly join it if my name were Dave Schwartz.
Some of these requests involve me joining a whole new site and this is usually more trouble than it's worth. Last week, an old friend from high school invited me to participate in some social networking site which I think is based in Spain. To become a member and accept the invite, the site requires me to fill out a long, nosey questionnaire that asks many things for which the proper answer would be along the lines of, "None of your business, jerkwad." It also demands that I upload my address book so it can send invites to everyone in it. Those of you who are in my address book will be pleased to know I did not do this.
But I've joined up with most of the others and I'm not sure why. I'm apparently networking all over LinkedIn, which means that I have some new and tenuous connection to strangers who have tenuous connections to people I know or who have tenuous connections to people who know people I know. So far, it hasn't done a thing for me except that I keep getting pinged and poked and nagged about not accepting the invite from someone I never heard of before in my ever-lovin' life.
I'm even getting friend invites from cartoon characters and dead people. Bill Hanna just made me a friend on Facebook, which is the first time I've heard from him since he told me a Yogi Bear script was late in 1983. Even though I attended Mr. Hanna's funeral in 2001, I'm not 100% sure this isn't him. He was kinda sneaky.
Actually, Facebook doesn't look bad and it might even be useful. I have some friends I'd rather consort with there than in person. Alas, the rest just baffle me. Some of them look like attempts to bring order and uniformity to blogging and e-mailing, which of course drains much of the joy. It's like when you were a kid and you were having fun with other kids…and then some older person would come along and try to organize games. Those games weren't as much fun because they weren't yours.
Before I end this, I have to ask: Please don't invite me to connect with you on any service unless I'm already on it because I'm not joining any more of these things. And I will be glad to be your friend even if we don't do it through Facebook or LinkedIn or any of these online institutions. In fact, just assume I'm your friend right now…and no, you cannot borrow money. I don't know you that well and probably never will.