This post is for any friends that are on social networking sites. Not that anyone reads this blog, BUT STILL.
I just got an e-mail from a friend of mine that I know from the shadowy world of MUGEN. No, not the part that makes random-ass fight videos and 10 minute presentations of their character select screen, but the part where people actually do things. I read it and it turns out that it was really an automatic e-mail from WAYN.com that was sent out to everybody in his address book or something. That automatically turned me off from joining the site, but it’s not as if I’m the target consumer of such stuff anyways. I’m not mad at my friend, but I don’t really trust any sites that do things like that.
The one that irks me more than that is Facebook. It sent me an e-mail that claimed to be from a friend with the message title, “I’ve added you as a friend on Facebook.” But it was really just some automail message that pretended to be him. Again, I’m not mad at my friend but I can’t really trust a site that sends out messages in other peoples’ names.
Look, I’m not paranoid despite what the brainwave-recording data files from the black helicopters would have you believe. And the fact that I’m not ready to trust certain social networking sites isn’t my way of saying that I’m not your friend. I just find it hard to join a website that starts telling lies to me before I’ve even joined up.
Yeah, I also condone that policy, I’ve never been a fan of social-style sites anyway.
Social networking sites are a double-edged sword. They get hated on all the time, but they’re quite useful. One side has the avoidable crap, and the other has people you want to keep up with/new friends entirely. If anything should bring you into favor of networking sites, it’s definitely the latter.
I do keep a MySpace, as i’ve been on it long before it was the “big one”. Plus, I never get spam from there, unlike junk mail that comes from Facebook and the other 4 million networking sites that popped up soon after. So it’s earned my trust.
MICROmor: I used to like the Yahoo.com clubs a long time ago but they stopped being fun thanks to the spammers.
Dynamowolf: I was digging MySpace until profiles started getting modded by people who didn’t know what they were doing. Like you said, I don’t get spam from MySpace and MySpace never sends spam to my friends while pretending that it’s me. It’s sad that other spots have set the bar so low that I have to big-up a place doesn’t commit email fraud, but, well, here we are.
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