In the past week, I’ve gotten invited to join 3 different sites in which I need to create a user profile. I do not know how to respond to these requests. What is the etiquette for social networking sites? Is it rude to simply ignore someone who asks you to “join their network?”

I was super into Friendster when it first came out. I was working at an office where I needed to waste a lot of time, and Friendster was an excellent way to waste a lot of time. Then, I got laid off and I stopped having a lot of time to waste. And I’ve never looked back.

I signed up for MySpace about 2 years after everyone else was on MySpace. I thought it would be a good place to put my music. Unfortunately, I signed up for a personal profile instead of an artist profile, and to this day I have been unable to change it. If you have a personal profile, you are not allowed to post your own music. Not for lack of trying. Here’s the pattern: I would send a message to the support people asking for help. I would get a response back that did not address my concern. On the response, I would be forbidden from responding. So I would cut and paste my exchange into the support email, and never hear anything back. This happened three or four times. You would think this would be a simple problem to fix, but if it is, no one has told me.

And it’s so ugly! MySpace is unbearably ugly. Everyone’s profile has a horribly busy background or the margins are all blown out by enormous pictures or there’s some crap song that starts playing the minute you open the page. On top of that, it refuses to remember me, so every time I get a friend request I have to click on the request, which leads me to a page saying, “you have to be logged in to do this.” But after I log in, I am taken to my profile page, where I always have to hunt down the “add a friend” link because I do not use MySpace enough. It is an unnecessary multi-step process that always seems to take an unbearably long time, even though, in all actuality, it probably only takes a few seconds.

Sigh. I don’t get it. This revolution is passing me by. This is all just an elaborate way of me telling you that, while I may refuse to be your friend in the virtual world, I promise it means nothing in the real world. We can still hang out. You could even bring along a picture, if you like, and I will write my impressions of you below it in brief, two sentence bursts of in-jokes.