Dippin' my toe in the social network

A tech-savvy colleague talked me into setting up a FaceBook page. "Blogs are so old," she asserted. "Everyone's using FaceBook now," which is, I gather, an version of MySpace for us older folks. Sure, why not? I'll give it a try. . . . A week later--it's amusing, diverting, a good way to kill a couple of hours in the evening. I catch some of my colleagues in their more zany moments. But, like the song goes, is that all there is?

Maybe I'm being stodgy here, but privacy is a concern. I like being anonymous, getting lost in the crowd and all that. We constantly hear admonitions about guarding our information from identity thieves, so I'm leery about hanging it all out there in Cyberworld. Has it become a more beneign place? Since when? And then there's the whole personal vs. work identity thing, especially when we're using these social networks (as we do in my workplace) for both professional and personal communication. When the personas co-mingle, it can get confusing keeping them separated (like relatives who don't speak to each other). Am I being old-style with my split professional-vs.-personal identity?

Or maybe it's beside the point because everyone's moved on to the next new thing. Which means I get the pool to myself.