Anyway

It seems social net­work sites are con­sidered the heart of the inter­net these days, at least if you’re under 25 (which I’m not); real-life net­works still exist of course, espe­cially if you have chil­dren (see Tim’s post on Real Social Net­works). I’m old-fashioned in that I still use email to keep in touch with people and not exclus­ively instant mes­saging (for one thing, lots of the people I email are in timezones 7 or more hours away) and I have enough to do without writ­ing in strangers’ scrap­books (one big reason I deleted my Orkut account was because I never went there except to delete what people had writ­ten in my scrap­book and even­tu­ally I couldn’t be bothered any more). For me the big value of a social net­work­ing site is being able to keep in touch with people I used to work with (in a com­pany, on some stand­ards com­mit­tee, or through the XML con­fer­ence). Given that people in the tech industry move jobs and email addresses with alac­rity, I’ve decided to use LinkedIn as a large self-updating address book. This is maybe not the major reason that the site exists, but it’s use­ful for that. So as I have time I’m search­ing for names of people I know and send­ing out invites to “con­nect” while I still have their email addresses (I’ve already lost touch with lots of people from DOM WG days, for example); for­tu­nately this pro­cess can be inter­rup­ted when the baby wakes up and demands attention.