The old grump
This morning I deleted my accounts at Facebook, Myspace, and OKCupid. I never used the first two, and the latter, while it did bring me one really great friend and (ex-)sweetie four years ago, has not otherwise been interesting. This is all part of my plan to simplify my life even more before the Big Move in the spring (yes, I'm moving to Vermont).
I'm here on LJ mainly because of that one OKC person (you know who you are), so it would be tough to leave behind. PMM would be on the chopping block, too, except that I feel some loyalty to it because it has also brought me some good friends.
I still find the whole notion of having to be a member of numerous walled gardens very annoying, and antithetical to what I imagined social networking ought to look like. What we have now is little better than the old modem-era BBSes, except that these newfangled sites seem designed to trivialize communication to an even greater extent.
IM is nearly as bad. It combines the worst features of the telephone (interrupts, no time to think) and the typewriter (slow, RSI). To compensate for these mis-features, you have to abbreviate like crazy, be willing to put up with cross-conversations (e.g., asking a new question while the other person is still responding to an old one), and spend tremendous amounts of time.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but email still trumps them all, despite its problems.