I have a friend who people pestered, half-jokingly, to interact on Facebook. He refused to open an account. He later revealed to me that he /had/ opened an account. As he told it, he signed up at 2 AM on a Saturday, and within 24 hours, he had over 200 contact requests. Most of these were from people he hadn't spoken to in 10+ years.

His thought was, if any of these people wanted to make the trivial effort to contact him (or vice versa) during that vast span of time, they would have. If they really wanted to be friends, in the present tense, in any meaningful sense of the word, they wouldn't have waited for the social networking / viral marketing soup du jour to "enable" it. This wasn't enabling at all; it was a burden.

He cancelled the account that same weekend.

I doubt you share precisely the same motivation, but speaking as one of those who jumped on the new Twitter account without having engaged in any deeper interaction first, I think I understand.

People aren't capable of having deep relationships with hundreds of other people. Most relationships are necessarily shallow. The trouble with the current social tools is that they tend to be binary, or at least they start out that way: We're connected or we're not. If there's a middle ground, it may be limited to a select list on a form. The tools aren't smart enough to detect that I'm never going to have an interest in what person X's kids are having for dinner, or that person Y is really, really excited about his faith, even if these are people I otherwise enjoy spending time with.

And then there's this <http://xkcd.com/386/>. Try as you may to avoid it, it's just a matter of statistics.

We have a long way to go before the tools are capable of externalizing a meaningful subset of my preferences when dealing with other people. I probably won't be happy with anything less than a semi-autonomous filtering agent. For now, I use the tools sparingly and I refuse to take them seriously.

Given what we have to work with today, I hope you can find a balance.