Chris Hardie's Blog

At lunch today we were talking about all the social networking sites that have popped up on the Intertubes over the recent years. Mark and I sounded a little curmudgeonly about it, noting that we've long since been ignoring invitations to join the latest fad in making virtual connections to the rest of the world. First I was on BBSes back in the day. They I joined some mailing lists. Then there was Friendster, which kept losing my profile and whose software sucked. And then there was Orkut, which I signed up for because it was Googly but I wasn't popular enough to do anything useful with. And that's when I sort of gave up. MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Linked In and all the rest can call me or send a representative to do lunch if they really want me. Except Myspace - puke.

Part of it is probably the sense that I'd rather be spending time strengthening ties in my real-world community than in an online one. Another part is just not caring. But most importantly, it seems the trend is such that soon we'll have one social networking site per each person with an Internet connection, and we'll be back where we started. I've got enough passwords to remember as it is, okay?

But it is funny to me when the networking sites scrape information off of my website in an attempt to make me look like a member. Like Spoke, which just did this without asking. Unfortunately, they get some significant things wrong, e.g. listing Earlham College President Doug Bennett as the president of my company, Summersault. To be clear, Doug has not left his position as the president of an internationally known liberal arts college to serve as President of a website development firm.

If he is looking for that kind of position with us, we're open to, um, networking with him...without the help of a website.