On Facebook and it's Friends

I am so annoyed at my annoyance of facebook. I am annoyed that I even have an opinion and more annoyed that I spend enough time on that site to be annoyed by the annoying people who clog up my feeds by adding, then removing, then changing, then re-spelling their favorite book, joining the facebook please respect my privacy group (my what?), throwing hamburgers and finagling their religous views from hopeless to black beans. But God do I love the personality tests, I mean I AM Carrie Bradshaw. Is that bad?

Last night newly acquired husband played with dopplr, I mean why just stick to giving the world y0ur address, your status as 'out of town' and maybe some party invite that give directions how to best get to your house along with pics of that new computer that your second to last status update advertised you just got for X-mas and that photo album you posted that shows that your balcony door is made of plywood? Why not document all your past and future trips in one perfect stalking package and make sure to put down a link to your blog and address book and write a review of your hotel with a specific recommendation of your room number?

This morning I got an email from Dopplr on behalf of newly acquired husband talking about being a fabulous jet setter who believes in serendipity and a re-invite to hi5 (they just don't give up) while WAYN informed me that I have contacts in town, which freaks me out because I am still paranoid that I accidentally hit that 'search my address book for contacts already on WAYN' and inadvertently send all my old college profs an invite. Of course before having my morning coffee even I already checked flickr and removed some porn from my myspace comments page although I do not seem to be important enough to be invited to 'small world' and I have not heard from anyone in Linked in a while either.

I just can't decide what I think about all this. The first time I posted a picture on the wide wide interweb I was a bit freaked out about how it could be used, the first time I wrote a sentence here I was worried about masses of people commenting (don't I wish) and the first time I wrote on someone's 'wall', I still checked my spelling. No longer. I love being able to see what my friends are up to, stalk ex friends from times long past (did they get fat? married? still stuck in my little town?), try to make myself just transparent enough to be found by people I want to find me and not by the ones I don't, I love looking at people's vacation pics, browse their contacts to find people I lost touch with, I love that my friends can know with what's going on with me without me having to write about every mundane thing that happens. All these sites are essentially the equivalent of chain emails about mundane things that are in turn the equivalent of sitting-by-the-well-village gossip that is not really worth writing about in an email or, grasp, letter. Not that I do the latter.

Nothing has happened and I have just about forgotten, only temporarily reminded by some friend's hacked myspace account posting that above mentioned porn, that all that info IS available to EVERYONE who wants to see it. I just counted up at least five social networking sites that know enough about me to ruin my career as a senator. I am fine with this, but honestly I have a lot of faith in our youth and there is no way that some nifty kid has not figured out a way to get all my useless personal information and I am only to find out in the future what havoc can be done with it. Until then, happy networking.