Dog bites man

From el Beeb:

Two teenage girls in the US have been charged with holding up at gunpoint a man they are said to have contacted on social networking website MySpace.com. (cont'd...)

I don't know what the going exchange rate for incidents like these is in terms of cancelling out the more common perv-lures-girls stories. I say we wait for two more incidents like the above and then declare the forces of lonely adult men and web-savvy teenage girls to be all square. Sound fair?

On this note, let it now be said that being held up by girls in braces is yet another reason for me holding out on the whole myspace thing. I've stubbornly made a point of avoiding the whole friendster/livejournal/myspace/facebook/stalkmenow fad for a whole several years now, and with every passing day it gets harder to spurn pleas to cross over from various people who like me marginally enough to enlist me in the cause of going from 436 to 437 friends. Someone even dangled the "top 8" bomb, which I understand is a great gesture of honour and respect in their native culture. And I steadfastly refused! And she was even a she! And pretty, too! The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the penis has nothing on my internetting principles.

There may be looming cracks, though. I initially made much of how by avoiding committing to one I was avoiding committing to any. That, however, was the old, pre-blogging Tom. Now, not only have I made the awful precedent of getting my toes wet with this very blog, but I'm even getting the earliest premonitions that people with these digital presences can actually use them to lead more productive social lives. Of course, people with cellphones lead more productive social lives, and that hasn't gotten me on that bandwagon. (There's the old cost excuse there.)

Now that I seem to have acquired that mana from heaven known as visitors, let me pose and open question: Is holding out on those websites (Wikipedia informs me they are termed "social network services") yet another example of inherent Tom canniness in all things net, or a misguided attempt at online time-saving that just results in lonely nights reading about the history of state secessionism in the United States when I could be listing my favourite Pink Floyd albums for the benefit of former classmates and friends of friends of former classmates?

The comments link has been tapped for the first time and can't wait to get hit again. Spill.