It's lonely on the social technology fringe

Social networking web 2.0 goodness just isn't as fun when you don't have all of your real life friends playing along.

That's the problem I've encountered time after time when new service after new service has popped up. Most of the people I'm friends with (in real life that is, admittedly not a huge number) don't keep up with web technology trends in the compulsive manner that I do and are content to stay with their old Friendster and Myspace accounts (with the occassional person who's moved over to Facebook). Meanstwhile I'm joining something new all the time, whether it be Twitter, FriendFeed, Vimeo, or Disqus. If it has some cool social function and a shiny looking page I'm sold.

Most of the time what happens is that I'll join and then realize that I can't use most of the neater parts of the service because I don't know anyone else who's joined. I'll look for new friends the first couple of days and just explore the site, but then I get burned out trying to get started and I end up just going back to visit every couple of days because I'm sick of putting in all of the groundwork. I've been able to wrangle the wife to join a few of these (she twitters way more than I do now), but she's usually fed up with me signing up for "another stupid internet site" and she's not as big of a internet dork as I am.

There's got to be other people out there like me, especially with all of the new web startups that are sprouting up. Do you guys have friends that are "connected" on the internet or do you just go out and make a whole new batch of internet friends on each new service that you join?

Comments

[Julie]

This from a man who just admonished me for adding "anyone" to my friends list on facebook because you couldn't believe that I knew 123 people well enough to friend them. I offered to share my relationship status with each, but you quickly tired of that when you realized that I actually do know most of those people.

Maybe you shouldn't be so stuck up about who you add and just get out there and meet some people.

:P

[Mama Gomer]

I have this problem. I thought that the people at my church would have a chance to get to know each other really well, in the comfort of their own homes, at their leisure, if I started message boards for the church. I convinced the church, set them up, got it linked to from the church website, got it mentioned from the pulpit every Sunday for a while, and put in the bulletin. The pastor even taught a couple of message series wherein he encouraged everyone to go discuss it and ask questions on the message boards. About 100 people joined over the course of a couple of years, but it was mostly joiners and not posters. The idea failed because not everyone lives online like I do. I guess many people think of the internet as a place to go check their email once a week or so, or they use it to check the movie times if the newspaper has already gone out to the recycling bin.

So to answer your question, no, my friends who live here in my town aren't online like I am, so they are not my friends on the various social networks I'm on.

But, all of my real friends are people I've met online and later got together with at concerts. And since most of those are Third Day fans, and since Mark Lee is sort of the pied piper of social networking, I can say that most of my real friends are on my online social networks. It's like the bumper sticker says, "I love my computer, because my friends live in it!" :-)