Who needs friends?
With the ever-growing list of online social networks, invitations to join the latest "coolest" network flood my inbox daily. I'm not a fan of such sites, at least not the "friends" part of it. It's a different matter with the "business" networks. Too much hype and wrong or plain fake importance is given to sites like MySpace. People were aware of and met other people before such sites existed and with all personal information users put online about themselves and others, such sites recently began to become rather a problem than a source of opportunities for some.
The ever-growing list of new sites requires a huge amount of time just to keep own profile pages updated and track friends' activities. With new features added to every site nearly weekly, the risk is high to miss out on the latest extension and thus become "lame" in the view of others.
What bothers me most is the stream of invitations by total strangers to add them to my own friends' list despite me not even having a common language with some of them. What's the use? Many users are "friend hunting", basically just artificially boosting their friends' list into the hundreds to show off what cool, handsome, exotic, strange, foreign... people they "know".
While I was bothered by half a dozen friends to join a network in the first place, it is often those people who after a while abandon the service and leave me with a list of inactive or hollow friends. Those I know have empty or outdated profiles whereas those I don't know keep growing. This is totally against the purpose of a social network.
To prevent further chaos, I won't accept any invitation on any network if it's not at least sent together with a personal introduction message. I'll also just ignore any smile or whatever action people can do to/for my profile page if I don't know them. I really enjoyed cleaning up my profiles when I deleted about 2/3 of all people in my lists of so called friends as either they didn't have an account anymore or never bothered to contact me. Better no friends than such friends...
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