Go, Bama!

Someone named Bama wants to be my friend!

Just look at the email I got today:

Bama R***** wants you to join Yaari!

Is Bama your friend? 

Please respond or Bama might think you said no :(

Thanks,
The Yaari Team 

No, I don't know Bama. And this is the second time I've told the folks at Yaari I don't have an interest in getting messages from their members.

Though I think there's some pretty tight controls on social networking from legitimate companies, I wonder how many of these young upstarts will start barraging us with messages from "friends"?

Since messages from Yaari come from Gmail and not the company itself, these may be harder to control than, say, messages from Friendster. 

On a personal note, I think the whole social networking scene has reached a critical mass for "protected categories" folk like myself (read: old). Suddenly, all my college friends are hitting me with LinkedIn requests. And the parents at my kids' school are contacting me through Friendster.

If I felt inundated with my To Do list at work, now I've got 26 Action Items on LinkedIn.

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Post Script:  One of my college friends called me to the floor on this post. For good reason. I was joking about my "lazy college friends who've gone on to lead semi-productive lives" hoping that you and they would understand I consider myself among them. Which, in retrospect, was not so funny.

I've since amended the post. 

My point was not railing against anyone using LinkedIn, Friendster, or the like, but rather finding out people that I never, ever expected to see on social networking sites were using them to reach out to me. Which is a phenomenon I still don't quite understand.

But which really didn't need to be the point of a post.

My apologies go out to all those who thought I wanted to LinkOut, hope you'll accept them.

T.