On Social Networking
melted_snowball brought up in recent posts both the balance of LJ and real-world, and the weirdness of facebook. Then yesterday I got an invitation from a woman I've met twice (friend of friend and potential customer) to join Konnects, a business networking site that as far as I can see is a lot of small-business and self-employed folks trawling for business (to other people who are also trawling). On the flip side, I've been able to track down a number of old friends on similar sites targeted ore to the tech/academic sectors.
I don't want to spend anymore time on-line than I already do -- it's a huge mind/energy suck. I mainly want to keep in touch with my RL friends in distant places. I may not make time for a daily chat with them, but I am a heck of a lot more in touch than I was in my previous "never call, never write" mode. I also want a little both personal & professional presence on the web where folks can check me out and ping me occasionally.
I'm sure others of you have figured out your own way to deal with this -- is there a particular platform that is better than others? Facebook seems 10 years too young for me, but has the brief style of communication I'm looking for. LJ is where most of my RL friends have accounts. Blogger is where most gardenbloggers seem to hang out. MySpace seems to be where my late-20 - early-30-something high school classmates are. And then there are the professional networking sites, whose needfulness is unclear to me in my current life space.
Thoughts?