Open (Anti) Social

Social Networking... yawn. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING and 100 more "networking" sites - *sigh*.

Now Google has plans to "open up" a new single API so that developers can create their own mashup applications built on a bunch of social networking platforms.

The new API thingie is called OpenSocial and Google is pretty excited about it: " The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues."

Really?

I always thought that's what IM, email, web forums, wikis, the telephone and (gasp!) Friday nights at the bar were for.

I mean, really! Here's yet ANOTHER way you can avoid face-to-face contact - and now it's even cross platform! Clearly this was invented by geeks for geeks. I mean with all the places (above) you can create "profiles" and link to other people and it's hard enough to update this blog - forget about constantly adding "friends" to link lists and tracking their RSS feeds. Unless you're a predator - who has the time to monitor all this virtual "interaction?"

I barely find the time to do my normal work, my take-home work, keep up with the kids' activities, say hi to the wife every now and then, and work on my "honey-do" list. Do most people really have that kind of time? If you are one of those people who love these social networking sites and keep up with multiple online profiles and subscribe to your friends Twitter RSS feeds - please let me know. I need to get a job like yours.