Social Networking

I have had previously bad experiences with Facebook and MySpace. Following the current wisdom about what potent professional tools they are, I set up business-like pages for networking purposes.

However. I have a fairly common name. When you search it, you get a whole crop of near-pornographic postings. Obviously, if you know me, you know those pictures aren't of me. But if you don't know me (and that would be the whole point of the social networking), you would be horrified and all professional contacts would be unthinkable. So I removed my pages and cancelled the accounts. I haven't been brave enough to try to figure out a work-around since.

The apps in the articles seemed useful, but duplicative. First we have bookmarks. Then we have delicio.us to compile our bookmarks. Now an application in Facebook to facilitate our delicio.us stuff. It's a bit much.

I suppose eventually the market will "shake out" and only the best of these will survive. For the time being, this is more than I need. I don't need/want a daily sunshine, picture of cute kittens and I sure-as-heck don't want to hear from anyone from high school. I am glad to learn about it, though, and will try to find a benign way to make my presence known in this sphere.