The Social Networks

Yup, that's plural. This post is not about the movie (which I haven't seen).

I first heard about social networking (though it wasn't called that) maybe years ago with Friendster. I created an account, invited some other friends to join, and then had no idea what to do with it. I let it sit there, and finally closed that account about a year ago.

When we got to the university, I opened a Facebook account. This was back in the day when only people with a .edu email address could get an account. Back in the day when each status update automatically started with "is". It was fun keeping up with my friends and making up gerunds and bad progressive-tense constructions ("is liking" *blech*) to create sensible status updates beyond "is in the library". Posting pictures inspired me to take more pictures in the age of the digital camera. All in all, I could easily keep up with it, and was liking it quite a lot :)

Today, however, Facebook isn't enough. For me, I also have this lovely blog, a Twitter account, an account on Ravelry (for lovers of fiber arts), SparkPeople (for those needing a cyber fitness community... this is usually the first to be forgotten by me) and Goodreads. Each one is different (although, I swear I will never full understand Twitter) and serves a different purpose.

But recently, I've been getting more invitations to other networks. Select2gether (I'm pretty sure this one is just spam, though). LinedIn. Academia.com. But where do you draw the line? The people who invited me for the latter 2 are good friends and reputable people, but I can't figure out how these networks are any different from what I've already got.


How do you social network? Where do you draw the line? Or is there no line to draw? Should we all participate in everything with the hopes of inspiring those heavy book sales someday? And if you use a number of different networks, how do you manage everything?