I never liked Microsoft. Windows has never given me much trouble, but it is nothing elegant. MSWord I use every day, and detest – clunky, and filled with bells & whistles I will never use. (Alas, I pine in vain for the long lost simplicity of WordStar.)

I never liked Apple. I’m sure their stuff works great, but Mac fans are so preachy, and the 1960s moderne styling doesn’t move me. Anyway I don’t want Steve Jobs deciding what apps I can run.

I like Google. What’s not to like? Its free! The front page and search results are clean, not tarted up. The ads don’t waste my machine’s bandwidth, or mine. The search results are pretty good. They haven’t beaten SEO spam yet, but has Bing?

My other blog uses Blogger, and though I have separate hosting, Blogger itself is also free, and for my minimalist approach to froufrou it gives me all the tools I need, with only fairly rare glitches.

But when the comment registration button on a blog asked me to join Google Friend, I passed up the opportunity to be closer friends with Google. I have Chrome, but still use Firefox as my default browser. As much as I dislike MSWord, I’m not inclined to switch to Google Docs.

I like Google, but I’m not so in love that I want to become dependent on them.

My own first Facebook experience was vaguely unnerving. No sooner did I log in than up popped four names of people whom Facebook thought might be friends. One I know, but the other three names were unfamiliar. A quick Google showed that one lives in the same county and belongs to a group I’m active in. We’ve doubtless met, even though I didn’t recognize her name. The other two have no apparent connection to me.

I have a decent online footprint; ‘data mining’ doesn’t need to dig very deep to find me. So what was unnerving? I think it was the hit and (mostly) miss nature of the connections offered.

Facebook did not come up with any commenters on my blogs, nor bloggers I regularly visit and comment on, nor in fact anyone who is part of my actual online social network. The one ‘hit’ is someone I’ve done work for; he’s mentioned on my LinkedIn page, but our connection has otherwise been by email, and the work I’ve done for him is not online.

So, why those particular names? The list wasn’t merely random, but it was odd enough to make me wonder how Facebook came up with it.

That said, I’m not terribly worried about my online privacy – what is genuinely private I don’t put on the Internet, and you shouldn’t either. But the experience was odd enough to leave me just a bit uncomfortable with Facebook.

And there is a more practical concern: For the most popular site in the universe, Facebook is confusing and not very easy to use. When I go to ‘my’ page (I just logged on), I see a couple more recommended friends I never heard of, pitches for some commercial websites, and no hint of how to do anything interesting or self expressive. WordPress and Blogger were a lot easier to figure out!

For now, when it comes to adding ‘channels,’ I think I’ll focus on Twitter.

In other news, we will be making some changes at TecTrends over the next week or two, and I will keep you posted as they take shape.

When I started hearing about ’social networking,’ I had only a vague notion what it meant, and what I knew of it seemed fairly irrelevant. You don’t really care what music I listen to, the same old MOR I was listening to when rockosaurs roamed the earth.

My wake up call came last June, when my blog readership abruptly jumped from a couple of hundred monthly unique visitors to a thousand. Google Analytics told me why: The guy who runs a respected space and science fiction site linked a blog post of mine on his site’s Twitter feed and Facebook presence.

In the cattle rancher’s language of marketing, Twitter and Facebook were driving readers to my site.

This tipped me off to the power of social media, but at the time gave me no reason to follow suit. The Atomic Rockets Twitter feed was bringing me more attention than any feed I could put up, since only people reading my blog would know or care about it.

Anyway, my first job was to keep the content coming, so the people ‘driven’ to my site would come back on their own. That went double for TecTrends Monitor, only launched last summer and in need of a proper archive of content.

Now both blogs have matured to the point where adding more channels to reach potential readers seems like a productive idea. And I will duly be exploring Twitter and Facebook to see how to make best use of them.

Yes, this is going boldly where millions have gone before. But I’ll provide some travelogue along the way, on the chance it will be helpful to any of you who, like me, wonder how to get the most use out of this technology.

The coming Web will be media-centric, he suggests, with ‘text-based interactions’ dwindling. But, adds Parr, social media will be its largest component. When you go online in a few years, he says, ‘most of the time you spend will be to connect with your friends.’

It is easy to hum along and nod to either one, but do they quite go together? Sometimes, yes, and there is nothing new about that. Entertainment and socializing have gone together since we did them around the cave fire. Now we can just do it at a distance, and mobile.

But usually we end up doing one or the other. We get to talking and the music fades to background, or we sit back quietly to listen to the music.

Now that we can have gadgets that let us do both, of course we will want both. But there is still a subtle paradox. The social part of social media is basically about chatting, whether it is voice or text.

Sure, we can send videos back and forth, but someone will have to make the videos. Most of us can’t come up with that many clever things to do with our iPhone cameras. (Or, in the enterprise world, send each other enough PowerPoint presentations that are actually worth the time.)

So whether we immerse ourselves in media alone or with friends, when we do it we’ll be communing first and foremost with … content creators. Who, for quality content, will mostly have to be paid one way or another.