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I don't know about you lot but I am constantly being asked to open a Facebook account by people at work, friends, family and all manner of hangers on, so that people can contact me. Erm, isn't that what email and the electric telephonic apparatus is for? "Yeh, but you can store photos on it for everyone to see". Why would I want my photos on the interweb for everyone to see? The are my personal memories of vacations and days out and soccer games and if I wanted to share them I would email them to my friends, not post them for the entire world to see them. Unless, of course I wanted people to buy them, but that's something else and even then I would create my own website and call it petesphotoemporium.com or something.

And the latest one is this LinkedIn. I do have an account there because I have been inundated with requests from people all over the world that work for Honeywell (yes I know people all over the world that work for Honeywell). I started my page, invited a couple of colleagues and then looked at other people's pages. They had 80 connections here and 40 connections there. I had 2. So now I felt pressure to link up to other people that I knew and spend an hour searching through their database for more people. I think I am now up to a whopping 6.

So my question is this: how do these, normally efficient characters manage to get through their work during the day and have 80 connections? If it took me an hour to get 6 connections how long does it take to win over 80? Or are they spending time at home doing it? Either way, why are they spending this time on it?

What's happened to calling people? Or emailing them? Are we now living in a society where we get satisfaction, not from performing well at work and earning the respect (and lot's of money) from our colleagues and customers, but from how many "friends" we have on Facebook.

And what's Twitter? Is this a social website for twits? Or budgies?

Then we have this new iPad. Isn't it just a slightly larger iPod Touch? A bigger screen to play bigger games and look at your photos, and read emails slightly easier than a iPod Touch. Granted you can read books on it and perhaps this is more environmentally friendly that the traditional paper versions but I won't be able to browse through the old second-hand electronic books in charity stores and pay $1.99 for them. No, I'll pay full price for them and build up an electronic library, drop the bloody thing in the street and lose the lot. Or am I being a ludite?

I'm off to read a book. Made from paper.

Peter