The Best Social Networking Site

I must apologise for playing a word game in the title, but my choice of social networking "site" would be a good old party. I am not a terribly sociable person and at times even find facing people a little daunting. Still, given a choice of online communication, phone and face-to-face meeting, I will pick the latter. It is hard to explain this is so; my guess is that the physical proximity forces both parties to give their full attention to the conversation and that makes the interaction more substantial. Which explains why I get pissed if my friend would interrupt the conversation to answer a phone call.

It is not that I do not believe in online technologies. Instant messaging can be very effective if friends are separated by great distances, and emails are good if instant feedback is not required. For some strange reason, I never seem to understand the purpose of a social networking service such as MySpace. I have a Friendster account for years now (don't ask why I got it), but I have done little with it except going through my friends' photos. I have tried sending messages to a friend, but couldn't see the point in using Friendster as a middleman, when I can just email my friend directly. Come to think of it, my friend probably found out about my message when Friendster sent her an email. Clearly this is getting nowhere.

My sister has a Facebook account, but it seems that she only uses it to check out her friends' photos, and I assume her friends use the service in a similar fashion. When they want to communicate, they do it on MSN. While there is nothing wrong with using Facebook as a photo album, the same job can be done equally well with Flickr or Picasa. Again, I'm missing the point on social networking.

The newest kid on the block is Twitter, where users tell the world what they are doing right this moment. For the life of me, I don't understand why I want to know gcorrin aka greg is currently "reheating [his] spaghetti". Conversely, I cannot find a reason to post an update every few hours, an exercise that is needlessly annoying and time consuming.

In short, these online services have some very interesting ideas and innovations, but for me they fall short of delivering a good socialising experience. Ideally I want to see and touch my friends, not a static picture or blocky video. When I laugh at a joke I want to hear my friends laugh too. Most online services facilitates keeping in touch constantly, but I argue it is the quality rather than frequency of each meeting that matters.