After reading a constant stream of impressive feedback from a variety of sources this week on Facebook’s new “Platform” announcement, I decided to dust off my empty profile and give it a whirl.  I really dig it as a potential central profile on the web and am impressed at how much of my electronic presence and personality I can integrate in a straightforward user interface.  But after fiddling around for the past 24 hours (adding some profile information, picture, music preferences, blog feed, etc.), I started to feel like a host, sitting around at an empty house, waiting for the party to arrive.

You see, as far as Facebook is concerned, I’m friendless.  I graduated college in 1999, a half decade before Mark Zuckerberg got to launching the service from his Harvard dorm room.  Not that we weren’t technologically hip up in the tundra of Hanover, New Hampshire - Dartmouth’s Blitzmail system (our internal email client) was our preferred and ubiquitous form of peer-to-peer communication even back in 1995.  That said, we had all long since graduated by the time social networking applications picked up steam.  Most Facebook searches on former friends and classmates, even those who I know are working in the tech-world today, turn up empty.

Ironically, I feel similarly lonely on LinkedIn albeit in the opposite age direction.  I feel too young to have grown cynical enough to value professional “networking” in time to jump on that bandwagon. 

As a naturally social character though, I have decided that it’s time I start inviting some people to join my party, which is why I now have a Facebook and LinkedIn badge in the right hand navigation of this site.  I feel officially young (or old), lonely, and cynical enough to join the social networking revolution! Please RSVP as you see fit.