graham at home

I don’t make a secret of my age so when I was looking at social networks I tried Orkut, MySpace and of course FaceBook. I can’t seem to get back into Orkut but that’s not a problem. I don’t check into Myspace very often and only a little less than Facebook. Facebook is harder to avoid as I have many friends and acquaintances over there.

Another social network I tried was TeeBeeDee because I thought that as it was a site geared for people over 40 it might have more relevance to me. It turns out however that it hasn’t impacted on my experience and that’s a shame as there are some really splendid people over on the site.

I decided to cancel my membership today and earlier the administrators took an interest in why I had left and I wrote them an email detailing my issues.

It sums up a lot of what I feel so I’m inserting portions here.

“There are a lot of awfully nice people on TeeBeeDee and none better than the
crew that runs it. I had a very warm welcome and it befits your service to
express concern on my departure.

I came to TeeBeeDee as a backlash of the FaceBook disaster. I’m 56 and
proud of that and I don’t really fit in with the FaceBook crowd although I’m
a confirmed geek and spend a *lot* of my time online.

[...]

In the end however TeeBeeDee is centered around the nice folks in the USA
and I’m an Englishman living in the French speaking part of Switzerland and
the cultural difference is uncomfortable.

My Mother’s day is on another day, there is no Father’s Day, we don’t really
celebrate Halloween and certainly not Thanksgiving or Labor Day (just some
examples).

So I don’t really feel that I “belong” in spite of everything.

The other reason is that I can’t devote as much time as I could/should being
spread out on the web and pulled in all webdirections at the same time.

I hope this helps to explain the reasons for my departure.”