Face To Face?

with Face Book... strange enough name... hear tell, that the originators, some under 25yr old entrepreneurs, turned down an offer of 1 billion US awhile ago... the group is number 2 in the socialization of the net, with MySpace number 1... but not by much... I was introduced to it by my daughter, and she has roped in a few of the family... I'm one of them ;) not terribly active, just keeping in touch with the family, in another medium...

not entirely certain of the value of it all yet... can only compare it to a huge room with a wide variety of people, whom you don't know, and your hanging out with your own chums and making new friends and meeting old friends along the way... searched on one of my old jobs, and found that they have several networks going... for current and past employees and students... when I checked out some of the friends lists I was amazed... instead of 10 or 20 as I had assumed, there were between 75 and 200... how can you possibly keep in touch with that many people from the past and present... the investment in time alone must be enourmous... no wonder some companies are blocking these sites from their servers... just as they did the instant messengers a few years ago...

considering I only have 20 family members on my post, I am still a babe in the woods... I think the thing that keeps me from going into the networks (still haven't signed up for any) or any of those to do with the old job, is the fear that I would be inundated with messages from old friends and acquaintances... for now they don't know I am on there, even though I found my name on a network for past employees that had been invited to join (obviously they hadn't found me, because it had been before I signed up)when I first started out in the Web back 11 years ago, I signed up for a few e-mail lists... fine enough, but my inbox was inundated with 50+ e-mails per day from each list... and these were not big lists, maybe 30-40 people... then I got into virtual worlds, and meeting people via the use of avatars and a program to surf the web that was a plug in to the browser... in the end I was spending from 6 to 8 hours a night on the web, getting to bed at 2-3 in the morning... truly I had been caught in a web...

so my question remains, is this truly useful or is it another source of wasted time... any thoughts or comments gratefully welcome...