Sergei Mutovkin’s Rumbling Mumbling

I’m noticing a slow but constant change in my opinion about social networking sites. Four years ago on the dawn of blogging, I thought about it as an absurd thing to do since if everybody will be writing something, even once a week. When will we have any time to read it all? Now I’m blogging and I don’t care if nobody reading it. I do it for my own satisfaction. A year or two ago I have join the first professional networking site LinkedIn and created a full profile, today I’m getting some invitations or job offers regularly only through this only website. What’s more I actually like to share all that information there, since if people don’t know about me - they will never find it or read it. However, one of my friends might find it interesting that I have say changed job or found somebody else whom he/she knows as well. LinkedIn not only helps to find new connections but also discover common friends or colleagues. This Saturday (July 14, 2007) I have joined another interesting network, a Russian website letting classmates find each other - Odnoklassniki. Almost immediately I have found a lot of the people whom I didn’t see in years and was even more pleased to see their pictures. Realizing that I like to see their pictures, I have posted mine, with the similar idea in my mind - may be one of them will also be interested to see them. So now to the issue a lot of people talk about when dealing with social networks - privacy. To be honest I think a lot of people just think of themselves being to important. I don’t think anybody, who does not know you, will go and look at it at all and even if somebody did - then good for them. Most probably they will not remember your face in 10seconds.
All in all, social networks are great - they let people stay in some sort of contact that otherwise would have been completely impossible. By the way, I also joined Facebook, the site I was avoiding for quite some time - what can I say - very nice website.