Boundaries are good. Narrow provincialism, bad. Social networking allows folks to preserve the former and take a hatchet to the latter.

But I shan’t expect a friend request from you, Cockrell!

I don’t worry about all that the way Hugo does. Your description is fine with me.

I think this is rooted in the fact that facebook started as a very select social networking tool that required you to have a university email account in order to even sign up. Its popularity was in part due to its exclusiveness. Even though anyone can be on facebook now, much of its privacy organization is still based in “networks,” some of which are only attainable through having a particular kind of email account. If you’ve ever noticed, it’s a lot easier to access just anyone’s profile on MySpace than it is to do so on Facebook. This privacy probably discourages the spambots.

Personally, though, I always considered MySpace trashier, the drunken-one-night-stand-after-meeting-in-a-dive-bar in design and execution compared to Facebook’s exchanged-cards-at-a-business-function-followed-by-wine-and-dinner-date design and execution. I’m sure that description is just loaded with negative class and gender assumptions, but that’s the way it popped into my head.

Sometimes I like to make pretensions of this level of influence in my social networking, but there might be 5 or 10 people that read me in their feed regularly For me it works in more of the opposite way. I add people like you or others who I respect and gain information and insight from them in the various things they post or reference. I feel select in that 150 you mentioned, lol.

The feed is also amazing. It is taxing to try and keep up with each individual consciously. That was the problem with MySpace, for example. To keep up with each person you’d have to visit each profile on a regular basis to check for updates, and who can do that? On the downside, I also feel that “the feed” feeds this lifelong voyeuristic impulse in me to observe others without being seen or having to interact with them myself. There are certain aspects of this in my life which I have had to consciously suppress, and their expression in the form of facebook has been a part of that process. However, it seems like any positive thing in life can be also be negative in equal proportion when handled the wrong way.

One annoying thing about people with a bazillion friends is that when I want to respond to some status of special interest, I end up being alerted 20 times in my email over the rest of the night when other people respond as well, hehe.

…

Also, I wonder why it is that on MySpace, which I never use anymore, I was often approached by real or fake women who wamted to hook up or at least have me check out their porn site whereas that never happens on FB. I will say that if I were a band or a comic I’d prefer MySpace and I hope that FB will catch up in that regard.

And Twitter………….feh.

In any case, I am constantly reasessing FB’s Valuable Tool And Outlet/Brain Sofetening Timesuck ratio.

(Which reminds me, I just threw a wildebeast at you.)