OK, so some of us have gone over and signed up at Outdoorzy.com — Dan Mitchell, Outdoors Pro, Winehiker, Rick McCharles — now I need you guys to go back over there at least one more time and add each other to your friends lists. Because that’s what people do at social networking sites. Something else that happens at social networking sites: complete strangers who share common interests may ask to be added to your friends list. It doesn’t make you friends in the conventional sense, but it widens your range of contacts, so, say, the next time you want to hike across in Alaska, you might have an Alaskan in your circle of acquaintance. With any luck they won’t send you to a locale frequented by predatory grizzlies.
Confession: I also want all my Two-Heel Drive cronies on my friends list. A self-esteem thing — they never gave trophies just for showing up when I was in Little League and it scarred me for life. (The nice thing about Outdoozy is you start out with three friends — the creators of the site — so you won’t face the humiliation of having nobody on your list. See, I’m all about the self-esteem.)
Our mutual friends at GetOutdoors used to have something like that as well, but it appears to be broken and no longer maintained.
So far, I’ve been suspicious of these “social network” sites like LinkedIn and MySpace that make it so effortless to give up a lot of privacy to total strangers. But I have found Outdoors Club site to be useful; they stick tightly to their mission of organizing trips.
One way outdoorzy has been useful already is meeting readers of this site who aren’t bloggers. I never have much of a feel for how many people are out there, beyond the folks who add feedback to my posts.