I announced last week that I gave my two weeks notice at work. Lets face it, once I gave notice there was a whole lot less to do at work than there was before. That is saying allot when one of the reasons I am leaving in the first place was I am bored. One of the things I have wanted to do but never really had the time was to sign up for one of the social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, etc) and search out long lost friends. I have used Linkedin for several months, but that is more for professional use than anything else, so I wanted to try one of the real social networking sites out. If you knew me you would think I would be one of the first people to use a site like that. I am in the technology field after-all, and a fan of the new and interesting. For some reason I have been slow to adopt new online social concepts like online dating or social networking. I think it was because when I was actually interested in that stuff I was so far ahead of my time that everyone I knew would make fun of me about it. Now it is acceptable.
I signed up for the two big sites Facebook, & Myspace. As it turns out I already had a Facebook account that I never did anything with so it was easy to start using. My initial assessment of both sites follows almost exactly a study I read about both sites. It basically did a study of who uses both sites and said that there are distinct general demographic differences between the two. After my brief experience I am believing in what I read. I am not going to get into the details, but I ended up using Facebook. Myspace looked like it was designed by a 16 year old, and was too busy a site for me. It seems most of the people I know thought the same thing. After a brief search I only found one friend on Myspace and that was because I knew she was on it. Within 20 minutes on Facebook I saw like 30 people I knew.
Too me the whole idea of using a site like Facebook is to find friends who I have lost touch with. I had a list of a few names I wanted to look up. I actually suceeded in finding a few people, and in the process found several others I had not thought about. The funny thing about this process is you end up getting invites or hello emails from other people you may not have found, but who have found you. Here in lies the problem for me. I am horrible with names. It is hard to remember a name of someone you knew 5, 10 or even 15 years ago. I have already had to reference my college and high school yearbooks to verify that I knew someone. Sad I know, but it is true.