So, the normally socially inadequate me actually went out on Friday night.

With people from work, to celebrate a few combined birthdays.

Went to a few trendy bars and drank fairly large amounts of cider

(well, fairly large for me, lightweight that I am)

And even though it was all horribly normal and trendy, good fun was had. And photos were taken.

(But not by me for once since my lomo bit the dust and hasn't been replaced yet. )

So, come monday morning, chatting with folks about the fun that had been had, ask about who was taking pics and where they may have uploaded them?

Facebook.

Sodding facebook. Great. Marvellous.

"Super. Smashing. Lovely. Great." I might say, if I were a sarcastic Jim Bowen.

So, you're saying you went to all the 'trouble' of taking pics, downloading them from your camera/phone, cropping/cleaning them, and uploading them to the net, only to fail miserably in the last step by uploading them to somewhere that only allows people to view them if they're a member? FFS what has the internet turned into? Whatever hapened to "Information longs to be free"? I thought these sodding walled gardens went out of fashion in the 90's?

It's the internet, it's designed for the easy sharing of information (and pr0n, obviously) - you want to send me a message you can email me. You could IM me if I bothered with messaging systems these days. You could send me a message on my mobile or my 360.

Or, hey, here's an old fashioned thought, I also have a phone number you can ring or -heaven forbid- an actual address you could write to…

Now, with these fairly accepted methods of communication I get a fair amount of spam and junk mail already. Nothing I can't deal with at present but I'm happy enough with that amount and don't want more. You want me to sign up to something that then gives anyother way for spam to get to me? No thanks, I already read everybody elses at work, I don't want to see it all again.

You want to show me some pics, stick em up on a website or if that's too tricky, use flickr or fotopic or one of the multitude of image hosting sites. Don't stick them up on somewhere like facebook, that's just bloody annoying. You've gone through all that trouble of uploading your pics so you can do what with them? Show them to people on facebook and only facebook? Bravo. At least if you upload pics to an open site you can use them elsewhere, but facebook? Gaaaah.

And hey, let's not forget the whole point of facebook, the social networking side of things - now I can sign up for yet another way for people who I may not want to be in touch with to get in touch with me. I've already got friendsreunited for that - That gets me all the messages from Ex's and people I knew from uni that I need, thanks. I don't really want to go through the rigmarole of signing up to yet another service so I can show people that I know:

a) Some of my own relatives

b) My boss, and quite probably my boss's boss's boss.

c) People I know from work but wouldn't necessarily call 'friends'

d) People I knew at School/University/previous jobs but haven't seen or spoken to in 10-20 years

e) A few people from such-and-such mailing list/forum/clan

This all has, of course, nothing to do with the prospect of only having 5 'friends' and everyone else in the world having eleventy billion. If I cared about that then this site would be up on blogger or some such popular site, wouldn't it? Somewhere were it might gather some hits rather than sulking in this quiet little corner of the internet by itself…

Having said all that, I think Virb looks a bit more interesting than most, if only because it's got last.fm style music tracking.

Unfortunately, at a glance, it only appears to be for iTunes and I'm still a staunch Winamp/Media Player Classic user…and I'm already on last.fm anyway, so what's the point?

Bah. I'm going back to being a hermit again, it's easier and just generally less wanky.

If I DO go out again, I shall just have to get my lomo fixed beforehand and then not show anyone the pics. That'll teach em.