I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
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November 11, 2007
Self-Branding With Metafriends
Filed under: Rant
"This is hard to say to a friend, but our relationship is starting to take up too much of my time. It's weird that I know more about you than I do about actual friends I hang out with in person--whom I propose we distinguish by calling 'non-metafriends.' In fact, I know more about you than I know about myself. I have no idea what my favorite movie or song or TV show is."
Joel Stein's back page essay from the October 15 Time magazine is hilarious. Entitled "You Are Not My Friend," I resonate with Stein's social networking rants. He thinks sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter "aren't about connecting and reconnecting. They're a platform for self-branding."
"...you're a bit aggressive in our friendship. Would a non-metafriend call me up and say, 'Hey! Guess what? I have a bunch of new pictures of me'? Or tell me he'd colored in a map of all the places he'd ever been?"
I signed up to LinkedIn a year ago and just recently to Facebook. I joined mostly because of the email barrage of invitations. I don't spend time on any of these sites and I feel kind of silly that I even set them up.
"We've gone 40 years back, to sales tactics predating irony, self-deprecation and actual modesty. We are, as a social network, all so awesome that we will soon not be able to type the number 1, because we will have worn out the exclamation point that shares its key."
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