Keeping Up with Social Media

So I just joined LinkedIn at the behest of a friend. Apparently it's a good networking site and at this point in my life, it couldn't hurt to network a little more for various reasons.

But now the challenge is-- what's the best way to maximize my time using it?

I've been on MySpace for a couple of years now and hardly ever use the thing, other than to poke my head into the virtual lives of some friends every so often. But otherwise, it's become more of a headache trying to read people's pages with all kinds of clutter and stuff going on.

And I've started a Facebook page but hardly ever touched it.

And then there's other sites which I've barely even dipped my toe into, like Twitter or Friendster or chat rooms or SecondLife.

How can people possibly keep up with all these things?!?

To me, it just seems like too much time and effort that can be spent dabbling with these sites, tweaking and prodding your profile, trying to meet new people, when in reality I'm not so sure that meeting people face to face isn't still the best way to go, though that can involve a lot more time and effort. But it's a lot more real too. Obviously.

Maybe I'm a throwback kind of guy, but I just don't have the patience to keep up with these sites like some people do.

I'll throw up a blog post every once in a while, but quite frankly I've got too much of life to explore to dive into the social media world and sit around and imagine what other people are doing all day!

Ok, that's about all the time I have... time to go read a book.

(Do people still do that?)