Over at Mashable, Dave Taylor asks the great question When is it Time to Jump Into Yet Another Social Network?.

Here’s what I wrote over there:

A simple answer to this one.

You join when you’re ready.

When am I personally ready? When I start hearing people I know and admire referring to the new social network the same way they refer to email, text and phone calls.

“FaceBook me tomorrow?”

Or “I MySpaced her all about it.”

Or “Are you on Twitter? Follow me there.”

On the other hand, if it’s really cool, I might join before I’m really ready by that standard.

Of course, with Twitter, I joined not because everyone was on it, but because Robert Scoble was blogging about it and I didn’t quite understand its value by itself.  I saw it mainly as a way to write blog posts 140 characters at a time from my BlackBerry.  That it’s turned into much more than that is sort of a happy accident.

Pandora I don’t see so much as a social network.  It’s a music box for me when I don’t want to drag my CDs around.  Same thing with imeem.  I never liked MySpace much, even though I have friends who swear by it.  I swear at it.

[Image by M. Keef via Flickr under a creative commons license.]

Hat tip to Cool Things for this video, which features a water fall in Canal City, a mall in Fukuoka, Japan (don’t you love the name?

I can imagine going to Japan to run an errand to the mall, getting mesmerized, and then waking up 30 years later if they have a lot of eye candy like this.

Palo Alto
Wed, Mar 19, 2008
1:07:00 PM
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