"You have ... friends" - My thoughts on social software.

My attitude towards social software like facebook is kind of ambivalent. I joined the German equivalent studivz a while ago and I kind of like discovering people that I haven't seen in a long time. I got some information about these people, what they are doing now etc., which I probably wouldn't have found out otherwise. The question for me, however, is: If I don't care to find out about them through personal contact, are they really that important to me anyway? And how accurate is the picture I get aboout them through this medium? When I think about my personal pages at those social sites, I usually keep the information I give about me as short as possible because I think it would represent a kind of distorted image of myself. After all there's always only a limited set of categories that you can fill out about yourself. So, as you can see, I'm more for face-to-face social interaction.