I skinned my knee pretty good tonight on the astro turf where I play indoor soccer, and I'm just waiting for the MRSA to eat clean through my leg.

But that isn't my rant. I typically have a little extra energy on sports nights and do a little mindless surfing sometimes into the early morning, versus the mindless surfing I do the rest of the day. I have my 20 year high school reunion on my mind, so I've been checking out classmates.com a bit and tonight, reunion.com.

What an utter abomination both are. To think that these sites were both established well before facebook but still look like the product of a high school Frontpage computer science project. They are both dreadful to use.

And to top it all off, to see any information on any of your former mates besides the letters constituting their name you have to pony up for an account. This is to view information that they put in themselves. Bizarre. No quid pro quo at all.

Reunion.com is bad in that you absolutely can not see any information on a person unless you buy their premium account, while classmates.com lets you see a little bit of the profile information, but if you edit your profile and try to put in your email address or other links in areas that are free to access, they strip it out with claims wanting to maintain the quality of content on their site.

Is it me or does something smell?

I'm not a facebook homer (I actually lurk around more on LinkedIn) and generally don't understand the whole social networking thing (maybe I grew out of it 15 years ago with IRC and USENET), but facebook offers a whole lot more for a whole lot less¹ than these sham "find your high school sweetheart" sites. They just appear to be the defaults to turn to when you come up on your graduation anniversaries.

That's all. Oh, there is this in the event that you are hungry.

[1] Thank you, Wal-Mart, for enhancing my vocabulary.

Labels: nuttery, rant