On social networking etiquette and others...

Having working in the IT field for some years now, and knowing first-hand how long a virtual contact can last, I have always had doubts as to how useful the social contacts from social networking sites are. My own rule of thumb is that, however closely you work with someone professionally, once you fall out of touch in a couple of years, that contact would have become stale, rendering it almost useless. When I say "useless", I'm referring to a contact that can translate into a job or business, without having to go through the usuals, like serial rounds of interviews. Afterall, if I have to sit through those rounds of interviews, it would mean that this contact really hasn't vouched for me much, and I'm simply another potential hire in the door. If someone really knows you well, and are useful enough to get you to a job, s/he should have vouched for the kind of (good) work that you can do. If that doesn't happen, I might as well send resumes massively over the web, spray the bullets to hopefully get some hits.

Like much of my colleagues who left the company for greener pasture, they almost always send LinkedIn invites to me. Same thing happens to those classmates from an intensive online class that I recently took in a graduate program. I mean, given that I only worked with them over the course of 4-6 weeks on classwork, while these classmates are all good to work with on a class, I really would have no idea what kind of work they do, or how they might be like professionally; likewise, they me. I have serious doubts too, that they might remember my name, or I them. So, what's the purpose really, to build up 3985 (or more) contacts/connections in LinkedIn, when 99.99% of them are bogus or useless?

Perhaps, having "graduated" from social networking predecessors like irc, I'm more cynical too, for all these social networking sites. I have no doubts that kids and younger adults would fall heads over heels on it, thinking it's fun and exciting, but I really don't see anything interesting at all, following short-burst tweets from some celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, or poking someone in Facebook. I have no doubts too, that I'm probably too old for these things which seem so juvenile to me. I'd rather do something a bit more useful in life than to poke or tweet.