Apparently its cool to “hook up” with other poeple online these days. Services like MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, and LinkedIn abound.

Personally, I don’t have much interest in having hundreds or even dozens of “friends”. I don’t mind chatting in forums with people, but that’s different from calling them a friend. My real friends know who they are, and generally they are people I’ve known for a decade or more- not someone I exchanged some email with now and then. Yes, I have a MySpace presence, but that’s only because I like to keep up with Teresa Noreen, and MySpace is where she has her blog.

A lot of the purpose of these services seems to be to demonstrate how many “friends” you have. There are people who have thousands (!!) of “friends” listed. They go on cross-linking sprees to get more “friends”. I obviously have a much higher standard for who I call “friend” than most of these people do. Having dozens or hundreds (or thousands) of friends implies to me a pretty shallow relationship with each person- I guess that strikes me as rather sad.

Anyway…apparently I’m not the only person who is finding these social networking services are becoming just a bit much. Recently, services like Snubster, Isolatr, and Introverster have started showing up. We are seeing the birth of…antisocial networking?

The really humourous thing….Snubster is now promoting its hate lists as a way to connect with other like-minded haters. So its become a social networking site…sigh.

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