Most of my friends are right around the age of 30, and with the exception of swash, they’re just poor social networkers in general. Most of them do use facebook, but that’s where it stops. Some of them actually still refuse to use facebook out of sheer stubbornness, and just look down upon the whole social networking concept.

It’s actually a little bit frustrating when I have to email my friends if I find an interesting article, send the URL of a good site that I bookmarked, or send out a link to my latest flickr photo album. If we all used friendfreed, for example, they would just know when I uploaded new pictures to flickr, bookmarked a new site in del.icio.us, dugg a new article, updated my Netflix queue, etc.

A common argument I get into is that by sharing all this information, it actually gives people less to talk about when they see eachother. That somehow, having knowledge of what I’m reading, watching, or photographing ahead of time will detract from normal face-to-face conversation. I think that’s just bulls**t, and an easy way for people to justify a resistance to change or having to try something new. Similarly, there’s a wide belief that by spending too much time on social networking sites and the Internet in general, kids are losing their social skills. This belief is also quickly being debunked.

So if you’re around the age of 30, and not sure what this social networking phenomenon is all about, I urge you to give it a try. It will also be a much more rich experience if all your friends could do the same. But good luck getting them to join you.

Even if you’ve previously heard the famous rant of fictional news anchorman Howard Beale from the 1976 movie Network, you have to watch it again:

32 years later, I think this diatribe still resonates with the American public. It surely does with me.