Recently I was having a nice time in a chatroom on the net. But at the end of the talk the person I was chatting with asked if he (or may be she) could add me to his “friends” list and thereby keep tabs of my comings and goings in the online world. “Sure,” I replied, not because I was yearning to keep in touch but because it just struck me as rude to turn down such an invitation.

Last week, a similar episode occurred in my real life, when I prepared to leave a meeting with someone I had never met before but really liked. This time, my host asked me if I was part of LinkedIn, a buzzy Web site intended to link people with similar business interests.

In the case of LinkedIn, I was privately relieved to be able to say that I had not yet joined, although I noticed that people kept asking me if I was a member. And, I must acknowledge that the invitation, like the one in Second Life, irked me on some level.

Don’t get me wrong. I like people, and interacting with so many of them is one of the great pleasures of my job. And, heck, all that journalists do all day long is call people who may not want to hear from them. But I wouldn’t want to join any social networking Web site that would want me as a member.

I say this in full recognition of the rampaging popularity of social networks and the fact that big media companies — particularly the large club that still envies Murdoch’s snatching of MySpace in 2005 for what now looks like a knockdown price — have developed a full-bore teenage crush on these businesses.

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