Social networking madness

Facebook has been incredibly successful and it has rocketed from obscurity to become the most visited website on the world in no time at all. Twitter has also grown rapidly to become hugely successful over just a few short years. It seems that everyone wants to share everything and interact with their friends, relatives and work colleagues, or do they?

I think it is wrong to assume that everyone wants to share everything and the amount of social networking facilities built into modern computer software and mobile phone and tablet apps is actually becoming irritating. It seems that every program and every app assumes you want to share every detail of your life online and to connect with all your friends, relatives and work colleagues. Programs and apps have buttons, links and menus to access sharing features and everything you do they say, "Do you want to share that on Facebook and Twitter?"

The latest madness is the app I have from my gas and electric company. At one time they used to send someone round to my house to read the gas and electricity meters to see how much I had used before sending a bill. Now there is an app for that. I can read the gas and electricity meters myself, tap the numbers into the app on my mobile phone and it sends it to the company. It's more convenient for both of us.

I got an email recently asking me for the latest meter readings and I dutifully went and read the meters and entered the values into the app. That's fine, but then it asked if I would like to share this on Facebook. Yes, there was a Facebook button in the gas and electric app so I can share my gas and electric bills with all my friends, relatives and work colleagues. I just know they are tingling with anticipation of news of the latest figures.

This is ridiculous. Who on earth wants to share their gas and electric meter readings on Facebook? I declined the offer. Perhaps I should have tried it just to see what is posted, but enough rubbish gets posted and I didn't want to bore everyone with trivia. Just think, in the future I would have been able to look back using Facebook's timeline feature to see the fun I had reading the gas and electric meters back in 2011.