Okay, you can stay on my lawn, just stop humping the garden Gnomes.

This is a follow-up of sorts on my last post, and an attempt to not just look like a crusty old man yelling at the neighborhood hooligans.

As much as I object to MySpace and Facebook, I do like the kernel of the idea of what they set out to accomplish. That said, if one absolutely must have their social networking fix, I think Virb is really a better option. I've had a Virb account for several months, haven't done much of anything with it because I'm lazy and boring, but I like the site. It's not as widely used or as popular as MyFace, and it doesn't offer much that Spacebook doesn't already have available, except for the absence of everything that makes MySpace and Facebook so very, very annoying. And that's enough for me. Virb is kind of minimalist and for the most part it doesn't get in your face. I like that.

Also, I feel compelled to share that I absolutely love social bookmarking. If you haven't already experienced the joys of sites like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, then you should, like right now.

(Except not ma.gnolia, because their servers are down at the moment and they've experienced data corruption/loss. Which really truly sucks because I prefer ma.gnolia to del.icio.us and I feel lost without access to all my ma.gnolia bookmarks.)

These sites rock because sometimes (often) I'm at a computer which I do not own and happen upon a cool, informative, or otherwise interesting site that I want to bookmark for later reference. Well, Foxmarks is great but I don't (for example) have Firefox at work. So, I turn to my trusty Ma.gnolia bookmarklet and all is well... when the service isn't hosed, at least. :( Social bookmarking not only lets you keep a repository of all your favorite sites on the web, but it is a phenomenal resource for finding information on whatever topic tickles your fanny. In some ways it's superior to using search engines, because search engines just give you whatever matches their algorithms decide are relevant, while with social bookmarking you can see what other people who share your interests have decided are actually relevant. It's like asking your buddies what movies they like instead of reading the stuffy newspaper reviews. Or something.

But you probably already knew all that. And if not, now you do. So, there. I've promoted something social. I'm not a curmudgeon.