I don't get it.

Not about diabetes today.

I don't get mainstream social networking.

I have colleagues and friends that say "You need to have a mySpace/Facebook page".

Why? I have 2 "presences" on the net. My Flickr page, and this blog. The MySpace's and Facebooks don't appeal to me at all (although I wish I were on Facebook during the heyday of Scrabulous - I would have loved to play multiple games at the same time), and Everything that happens in my life (that I feel comfortable sharing with the entire world) can be found at these 2 sites.

And to be quite honest, I've never seen a good-looking MySpace page. Most of them have garish, ugly backgrounds, and weird text color/backgorund combinations that cause my eyeballs to dry out just looking at them.

Why the need for on-line social acceptance? I'm not knocking anyone who uses mySpace/Facebook. If it works for them, then more power to them. But the fact that some people have thousands of "Friends", but how many do they actually know? I mean I have 5-6 really close friends, and I know them pretty well. But to say "I have hundreds of friend on my mySpace page" is ridiculous. For instance - Leo Laporte (of This Week in Tech, and the TWiT Network) is in a friendly "friend race" on Twitter (another thing I don't get) with John C. Dvorak and Kevin Rose (the founder of Digg). Why? They have literally tens of thousands of people following them. Now I know that they have a certain geek celebrity status, so the rules aren't quite the same for them, but for a normal person to say there are thousands of people following there every word? Hehe.. to me it's almost like high school - it's a popularity thing, and I've always hated popularity contests :)

So to all the people that have been telling me to join a social network - please stop. I have my blog, and I have my Flickr. I might not be on the leading edge of Web 2.0, but I'm happy where I am.