social networking

I'm probably one of the last 34 people on earth who isn't on Facebook, largely as a result of privacy concerns... although in part that's a matter of principle. I do have a fairly active LinkedIn account, a necessity in my line of work, and with careful management of preferences I'm willing to tolerate the occasional annoyances that come with a site's relentless efforts to grow.

Yesterday I was invited... twice, actually... to join the two-day old limited public beta test of Google + and despite what the press is saying about access being cut off for a while, I was able to set up a page with no difficulty at all. As the various articles and tech blogs are saying, there's a reasonable level of control over privacy settings, setup is simple, and it's generally a much more adult experience as one would expect with a more mature company. The integration with other things that I use a lot... gmail, Google docs, maybe eventually this blog? is also a big plus. So I'm willing to give it a try, even as I recognize that it's a tradeoff to some extent, and with the realization that spending more time online is probably the last thing I want to do.

It's a necessity to network effectively these days,  especially for people like me who work all over the U.S. So far this looks like one more potentially effective tool, and time will tell how true that turns out to be.