Social networking is the fad of the decade, apparently. I partake in it to some degree. Actually I always found a static web page and some discussion on Usenet or one of its lesser-known NNTP-based siblings quite sufficient, but today anything without a GUI is just not done any more.

A friend and colleague finally made me create a profile at Xing. Alas, it was less helpful than expected when I tried to leave the job I had then. Still serves to present my extended professional information to anyone who is interested, though, but I rarely use Xing's other features.

For a while I used Facebook, but more and more I found the changes to the -- already too complicated when I started -- privacy setting tools and concepts really annoying. They seemed to be designed to confuse the users and make them finally give in to Zuckerberg's "post-privacy" ideas. I am still undecided if I should find them just immature or outright dangerous. Anyway, I stopped using Facebook a while ago.

I forgot who dragged me to LinkedIn, but I am there, too, with little difference to the Xing presence.

When I write something of maybe a little more than ephemeral value, it goes to a blog at Dreamwidth. This is a rather unsorted collection of technical stuff (some bits about IPv6 at home when I had it new, for instance), books I have read, cooking stuff, and things.

I tried twitter, but did never really get it. At some time I failed to delete my acount there, apparently, but that was okay as I could later re-use it when I had to test something.

The latest craze is Google+, just like Facebook, but not Facebook. To do them justice, they have learned from the experience of other projects, including Facebook, and made few things better. The main one is, in my opinion, the very clear and open handling of who gets to see what. I was quite fond of it for a while, until I learned that Google wanted to use it as an identity service, and that the social network was only a facade to lure people into it. That is dishonest in my eyes.