social network burnout no match for serendipity

I never obessessed over MySpace. I’ll admit to having had a lurker account; how else could I check out the seemingly endless stream of grainy cell phone pics snapped in bathroom mirrors across America? And, later we did set up a QuadMag MySpace account where I sometimes check in. But I’ve never personalized a MySpace or checked it compulsively. Unlike so many of my peers, the craze missed me.

Which is probably why, when Facebook kept knocking on my e-door, I ended up embracing it with enthusiasm.

Many of my friends are not so eager, even the one who have been (or are) avid MySpace and Friendster users. The early volleys of Facebook marketing didn’t snag me too quickly either, but a few weeks ago I logged on and didn’t immediately log off. I stuck around and somehow ended up channeling a good portion of the energy I have for online activity (outside of work) into that site.

A chance contact with a woman I needed to interview convinced me of the site’s magical possibilities, and by the time a cousin from Finland found me with news of her engagement, I was seriously hooked. Besides, who knew that online Scrabble was so addictive? I was so caught up–adding friends and coworkers and testing new apps–I questioned the need to have a personal blog at all since sites like Facebook seemed so clearly to be setting the pace for personal representation online.

Scrabulous remains my favorite Facebook app. The lettered tiles invade my dreams like Tetris blocks once slid down my peripheral vision. But I can’t blame the alluring game for my INVITING PEOPLE to the site, pouring email contacts into the system like wax into a mold. Suddenly Facebook made my blog posts about media intake seem… lonely. The opinions and thoughts posted here won’t be immediately aggregated into the opinions and thoughts of a community of friends/acquaintances/people who want to sell me things.

The attempts to monetize my eyeballs are easily the least trust-inspiring part of the social networking experience, and it doesn’t help that the information I plug into Facebook is not exportable. But I find the discussion around it really interesting.

• What MySpace-Facebook Rivalry?
• I’ll admit to rooting for Facebook to fail . . .
• The New Portals: It’s the Bread, Not the Peanut Butter

There’ll be more to say about this in the future.