Recently I’ve been giving more thought to these social networking sites that keep popping up. In conversation there is a phrase that is becoming more common. It pops up all the time. “Are you on Facebook?” For a while people gave me with the “what planet are you from” look whenever I said no, that was until I gave in and put what I considered to be information about me on Facebook. When people have checked the page since then they have remarked on how thin the information is. One standard picture, my name and what I deemed to be a humorous comment for location. That’s it, nothing else, what I believed to be enough. Apparently it wasn't enough and people seem only happy when you post enough information so they know what you had for breakfast 2 weeks last Tuesday and the colour of underwear you wore on Thursday. I just feel nervous when posting information about me anywhere. Apart from what I allow people to know of my business life and a small amount of personal info to put the business into context the rest is absolutely private.

Now, not only do we have Facebook to contend with but my mailbox gets quite a number of junk emails from other sites such as Tagged and Fanbox among others. The only site I have a little more detail is on LinkedIn and just because it is a business networking site that generates new customers. Just how much detail of our lives is being presented on the internet? Even employers are now checking your “web footprint” to find out all they can about you. It's all a little too much for my tastes.

I was about to bend to the peer pressure and add more detail to Facebook until I interviewed someone for a job. In the interview he was professional, ticked all the right boxes and in the conversation towards the end he mentioned that he was on Facebook among some other networking sites. When I checked his page he was the typical beery, mid twenties, professional lout. Now the mid twenties is not that far back for me and I fondly remember them but there was a large amount of unnecessary detail that I really didn't need to know. What did put the nail his interview coffin and turned a possible job offer into a refusal was the depth of information he had posted regarding his current employment. He attacked the work he was given, heavily criticised the people he worked with and gave away information about his employers and customers that both would certainly not want in the public domain. This was definitely not the type of person I need working for me and it was in complete contrast to the professional image he portrayed at the interview. I know that the profile can be limited to just friends on a list so it does call into question his common sense about having his profile open to all and sundry. It gave some indication of how forward thinking this person was. I let him know the interview outcome and explained, in detail, why he hadn’t been offered the position. Needless to say he wasn’t very pleased and tried to argue that it was his personal life not his work life. Maybe I was a little too harsh but I can’t afford to take the chance that he would belittle the work he was given or criticise the company or clients. At the end of the day I run a business and it only survives if the work keeps coming in. It is risky enough without taking unnecessary chances.

In an age where information is free flowing and there is a constant rise in identity theft does anyone know the “safe” limits regarding the information we post about ourselves? How will this information be used? Who is going to read it? What opinions will the reader make? Are you giving an identity thief enough information to answer your security questions? Have you given details about your pet? Your parents? Your mothers maiden name? Your date of birth? All these questions are probably asked by your bank when you call them. All it only takes that one bank statement you threw away without shredding and the Facebook info and your identity is stolen, your bank account emptied and you now have a rather large loan. Just check to see if all this information open for anyone to see. Personally, I just can’t see the point of these sites other than to keep in touch with friends but I do that anyway through email, phone and actually meeting in real life.

Apart from the security of the information I still fail to see where the attraction lies in sites like Facebook. Perhaps that is why I am not “the billionaire Steve Wood”, just yet. When I hear someone say, “I was on Facebook for a couple of hours last night”, I have a compulsion to ask, “doing what exactly?” What on earth can hold someone’s interest for so long when the concept is just to keep in contact and network? Of course there are the Facebook applications that every man, woman, child and dog seem to be adding every second but what are they? They just appear to be a digital version of those pointless, tacky, “what kind of lover are you”, magazine quizzes. Has our time become so cheap that we can afford to squander it? A couple of hours? 10 minutes to check the messages perhaps, but not a couple of hours? A couple of hours is a long walk with the dog and better half, or a meeting with real people, seeing a movie, time at the gym, it is anything but sitting on the sofa with the time leech on your knees basically doing nothing but letting the time drop down between the cushions.

I can understand these sites from the point of getting in touch with long, lost people from the past but I thought friends reunited did that without all the ads and time wasters that get presented by Facebook? I do find that I just need to get into these things, do what I need to do and get out without being inundated a ton of pointless, meaningless waste of time. I only need to find out an old friends email address and then the communication carries on there, then to phone calls and then to meeting. I know a lot of people will disagree with and my view and that some may actually like spending hours in front the computer, chatting away, caught in the computer timewarp when 1 hour seems like 1 minute.

If there is a need to use these sites then just be sure to keep the information locked, only add people that you know and trust (when added they see your info), be careful on the amount of info you have on there and don't waste all the time at the expense of spending time with the ones around. A little common sense can save a lot of heartache and I've seen the effects that identity theft and spending too much time on the computer can have on a few people I know and it wasn't pleasant to watch friends go through those things.