register_nowI’ve been Twittering my little heart out, linking up on LinkedIn and mass emailing, listserving and texting. I could spend (and sometimes I do spend), hours each day networking on these platforms and trying to stay dialed into the important social communities.

But I can’t keep up. This weekend I received a notice that my invitation to join Grouply (where I can consolidate my Google and Yahoo! Groups) was about to expire. And I just signed up for Goodreads because my blogging buddy Wendy sent an invitation. Goodreads shares book recommendations from my personal friends and tens of thousands of potential friends. On Twitter moments ago, people started revealing their locations using Brightkite, a location-based social networking tool.

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Argh!

Many of these social networks will scour your inboxes to help you send invitations to more friends to join your network, so you can send out hundreds, thousands of invitations….I feel bad when someone I know invites me to yet another network and I ignore the invitation. Each time I join something else, I have to share my email, remember a password, remember that I’m going to be findable somewhere else on the web, create my profile, upload my picture…. And, to make it a useful connection, I have to start interacting on that community as well.

Come on, people — can we really do it all? Can we live with all this social networking noise? How in the world can we get work done when we’re Tweeting, Linking, texting…? Remember when Jan from the Brady Bunch tried to join every extracurricular activity there was and ended up a multitasking mess? Do we really want to be a member of every single group?

I’ve heard that American workers are more and more productive, that companies can get more done with fewer employees these days. Is it because of these technology advancements, or in spite of them? Are we simply hiring more people who are better at multitasking?

What was it… 15 years ago? … when home computers first started having the ability to print personalized greeting cards? I embraced that technology before anyone else I knew, and all my friends ooohed over the custom color cards I printed on my ink-jet printer. And then everybody started printing their own cards (and then they started using e-cards instead), so I went back to hand-written cards sent through the old-fashioned postal service.

I’m feeling the same kind of stubbornness with all these social networks. I think I’ll embrace a handful and let the rest of the world pass me by. I think I’ll use this odd-shaped paperweight, otherwise known as a telephone, to reach out to people I know. I’m not going to sign up for Grouply, Brightkite or any more cool groups for a while. In fact, I think I’ll just use DarkCopy to convert my monitor to the black screen with the blinking green cursor that I had when I first saw a computer.

Or maybe I’ll buy a typewriter….