I am officially off of every social networking site besides Facebook and Twitter. I’m staying on those because you get a lot of information Twitter and Facebook lets you look at pictures of your old boos and play Mafia Wars. It took a lot of debate for me to delete my Black Planet page and then all the other lesser ones like Tagged because I hadn’t quite let go of the idea of meeting someone new just sitting at your desk during the day. As cool as that was and still is it has gotten complicated because everyone is on the web now and you never know who you are going to run into.

There used to be a time when the Internet community was a close knit group of people. I met a lot of great friends online. Everyone was connected by three degrees of separation. That was especially true in my city because it’s not that big so we really were a small crowd. Folks in the hood barely had computers so you could have a whole other life online and not worry too much about anyone like your close family members finding out. You were pretty safe as long as you didn’t do anything crazy. I never created a separate life or anything like that but I am a guy that likes privacy and discretion so it was cool to me. Now if you start a conversation with someone and are not careful your mom might be reading it.

The other thing is that my life has changed. I’m a respectable dude in the community. I’m a daddy. I have a career taking off and even my hobby draws attention to me. I don’t want to risk the chance of giving someone the wrong impression or talking to wrong person. I used to have this bad habit of staying up late when I’m drinking and sending out drunken friend Request. It turns out two of the ones I sent ended up being parents at my girl’s school. Don’t get me wrong…they were definitely worthy of a request but I didn’t feel comfortable with having all of those worlds crossing. I never run into those kinds of issues on Facebook because it’s designed for everyone to be in your business.

It was time to let the online profiles go. I guess my Friend Request days are over. I could make an anonymous one to look at pictures.