Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time

I was going to write about something completly different today, but after reading this article I decided to switch topics. Go ahead and read it, I’ll be here when you get back.

If you didn’t feel like reading the article, just a quick synopsis – some guy is suing classmates.com for false advertising. This reminded me of when I received my high school alumni directory. What a printed piece of useless information. All it had was 10 year old addresses in it. It was completely worthless. Many moons ago I had signed up for a classmates.com account, but that too is pretty lame unless you pay for a membership. But even then would it be worth it? Probably not back then and certainly not (in my opinion) now in the days of MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

I’ve reconnected with many old school friends, both high school and college, through Facebook and am quite happy with its clean interface (yes I am one of the dastardly people who likes the new Facebook layout). Why Facebook and not MySpace? Mainly because I hate being blinded by the crappy themes that MySpace allows its users to setup. Also the fact that Facebook emails me actual information of which I can then log into Facebook at my convenience to respond. MySpace just emails a generic message which then forces me to log in to see what it going on. Actually I don’t, I haven’t logged onto MySpace in forever. The only reason I leave it up is so if someone wants to find me they can and since I have links to my blog there they will know where to find me.

Another advantage of Facebook is that I can ignore all of the stupid applications. I would rather they didn’t exist, since I find them too MySpacey but at least I can ignore the super-pokes and the vampires and all the other crap. That would be one advantage to LinkedIn. It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a way to form business connections. So even though they opened up to developers there will be no throwing hearts at people or other ridiculous things. However, more people are on Facebook and so there I am too. Which leads me back to Classmates. Why pay for something that is inferior to the free product where all my friends are anyway?

So, what do you use?