Once upon a time, my e-mailbox was jammed with messages from folks in Nigeria who wanted to cut me in on huge inheritances. It was clogged with ads from people who wanted to loan me money. It was inundated with mail from those who wanted to sell me medications that would shrink or enlarge key portions of my anatomy.
Thanks to the expert Spam-filtering efforts of Time-Warner Cable, those have slowed to a trickle. What I get now is a different kind of unwanted e-mail…
People — an odd array of friends, casual acquaintances and total strangers — want me to join Facebook. They want me to join LinkedIn. They want me to join Grouply. They want me to join Ning and Friendster and MySpace and Plaxo and various Yahoo newsgroups and all sorts of personal networks that don't seem to amount to anything else than me getting more unwanted e-mail.
I gather that in many cases, these are not personal invites. The person did not say, "Oh, my Facebook group would not be complete without the valuable participation of Mark Evanier." They just dumped their entire address book into the service and I happened to be in there.
An amazing percentage of these invites are from people whose names I do not recognize. Someone named William Keefe keeps writing, "I want to add you as a friend in Grouply so you can see my profile with my pictures, my groups, and my favorite group messages." I'm not joining, Bill. I mean, it's tempting because if I see your profile and your pictures and your groups and your favorite group messages, I might get a clue as to who you are. But I'm not joining.
These groups are supposed to bring people together, I guess, and cause us all to be friends. I find they're having the opposite impact on me. I'm starting to figure that anyone who wants me to be his friend this way is no friend of mine.