I was pleasantly surprised this morning when I logged into Google News and learned that the world’s wealthiest man, Bill Gates, had decided to give up on his Facebook account because “it was just too much trouble.”
Well, for once, I applaud something Gates has done because I agree with him that trying to keep up with social networking on sites like Facebook and MySpace is, to be frank and honest, a big pain in the ass.
I mean, seriously, who has the time to even answer the questions asked by the sites themselves during registration, much less to then get involved with all the silliness that comes afterwards when friends, relatives, and strangers start flocking to your page begging to become your friend so they can then endlessly share the trivia and detritus of their often inane, boring lives with you?
If people want to have friends, why not do it in the real world instead of over some stupid computer? Get together for a beer… go play Putt Putt, take a hike in the mountains… jog together in a nice park…
I mean, seriously, I can think of a zillion better ways to make and have friends than sitting on your ass in a chair wasting bandwidth sending goofy messages and lame images (usually out of focus and poorly composed) back and forth until it’s well past the witching hour every night.
I know that’s a dinosaur outlook in this day and age of online relationships, but, hey, I’m getting aged enough that I’m almost 99% convinced now that the old ways were (and are) the best ways.
And if you’re generally sick of people and mainly want a little peace and quiet in your life, then dropping all your social networking accounts makes a lot of sense.
With that said, I occasionally post on Twitter, which I don’t find particularly useful or interesting, though I haven’t yet closed my account since my son tells me doing so would make me even more of an old fogey than I already am.
According to the story I read about Gates quitting Facebook:
Gates was in the Indian capital to receive the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development, awarded by the government for his work for the charitable organisation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The foundation, built by his massive fortune, has committed nearly one billion dollars to health and development projects in India, targeting especially AIDS and polio.
I’ll save my rant for another time on why I think the world’s richest man is spending billions to vaccinate hundreds of millions in foreign countries all around the world.
And that’s my admittedly disjointed and not fully realized rant for today.
