The Land of Made-up Words

I have to confess not being much into the social networking website scene. Not out of Luddite fears of the interface or (as it turns out, justified) privacy fears regarding who sees the data these sites collect and how long it is stored. Rather, I just simply am not interested. I have plenty of friends in the “real world”, and my interactions at work, home and church are more than enough to keep me happy. (Besides, my lifestyle doesn't really lend itself to this sort of thing; no drinking, no clubbing, no beach parties... a Myspace page featuring me would be snoozeville for sure.)

My one concession to online networking is the professional website, LinkedIn. I signed up about 3 years ago when a Silicon Valley exec was guest-lecturing one of my graduate school courses. It has been interesting to reconnect and stay in touch with former colleagues, but I don’t use it aggressively. Over the past few months, though, I’ve noticed an uptick in emails from folks in my LinkedIn network inviting me to connect with them on other networking sites. The invitation goes something like this:

“Hello Dave! I noticed we’re connected on LinkedIn. I have recently been using [new-fangled website] to keep track of my colleagues and clients. If you sign up today, they’ll send you a free stuffed iguana. Anyway, see you around!”

To add insult to injury, some clever script-kiddie came up with the concept of re-sending invitations that are ignored, over the course of several weeks. (I still haven’t figured out the time to live of some of these; they just. won’t. die.) As Cousin Eddie would say, that’s the gift that keeps on giving the whole year long.

This begs several questions. How many professional networking websites do you need in your life? (At this point, my answer seems to be anything less than one.) If you’re soliciting connections from people on an existing service, aren’t you implying that there is some sort of defect with that service? It’s like calling someone up and insisting they switch to your cell network so your minutes are free.

But the biggest puzzle to me about all these additional networking sites is how they possibly hope to gain any credibility and marketshare with such ridiculous names. Yorz? Xing? Naymz? I suppose we have Google to thank for such absurdity, but to me this falls flat. As a five year-old I recall my father (who has graduate degrees in mathematics and engineering) keeping me occupied by having me write out a “1” with a hundred zeros after it, and explaining that this was a googol. Hence when Google arrived I made the connection immediately. I realize that many people did not have the same geek-formative experience, so Google as a word was meaningless to them before it became a verb and top-ranked brand. But here’s the thing: it really did have significance before its rise to fame, as opposed to the random consonant-vowel knock-offs that are clogging my inbox. To me they sound like a pre-teen attempt to subvert the phonemes of the alphabet (“Z is so much cooler than S!”), which is hardly a way to influence professionals to use your site.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to write a Gmail filter to auto-disintegrate yet another site’s spam…