Since moving from my hometown, I’ve lost contact with a lot of people. Notably because I stopped calling them and they didn’t call me. My mobile contact details (like phone and email) haven’t changed since before I moved. The only reason of thinking that people haven’t managed to get a hold of me is that they have all lost my email and/or phone number.

Plus there is also the fact that not many people look beyond a standard google search or social media site. Maybe its that if you don’t exist on Facebook, you don’t want to exist. And people get lazy and don’t put some basic detective skills to use.

Either way, occasionally I get an email, obstensibly from a person that I knew yeeeaaarrss ago. Sadly this email is an invite to some social site. The problem here is this: If they already knew my email address and were certain of it, why are they sending me an invite? Why don’t they just send me an actual message, written by them? Why do they have to use a proxy, like FaceBook, Diasporia or – Hellven forbid – WindowsLive?

They could send something like this:

Hi Jack,

Your Pal from Another Era

I mean it’s not difficult. And if they weren’t sure, they still could this send an email to test the waters:

Hi

Pal

It’s not that I don’t want to talk to new people or catch up with old ones. However, I don’t like joining social sites. The main reason for this, is that this kind of proxy really interferes with the social process. I don’t connect with people on this kind of level. I connect with them in the meatworld. Plus I don’t like being advertised to or my personal info collected for that express purpose. I would rather people actually make the effort to reach out and contact me, rather than use some other mechanism to act as icebreaker. It’s really not that hard.

P.S. – I know, I do have a twitter account but that’s more spur-of-the-moment encounters, not really for advertising the site.