Not that I don’t like social networks, but I see no use for them in my personal life. I use Twitter for business reasons mainly, like advertising my upcoming training “JavaScript for Java Developers“, which doesn’t prevent me from posting a photo of two salmon heads that I was about to use for fish soup. Java developers eat fish too, and these fish heads could start a small talk with someone, who could decide to enroll in my training later.

I have an account on LinkedIn, which, hopefully, one day will bring me some business opportunity other than these annoying emails “I want to add you to my professional network”. I have an account on Facebook (everybody does), but my main activity there is denying requests to become friends (is this wrong? did they bring business to anyone?).

As any citizen of an industrialized country where people don’t need to hunt for food, I live in two worlds – virtual and real. The question is, “Do I need to merge these worlds or should keep them apart?” Take a look at this image.

See a handsome face on 15F? You guessed it right – it’s me! No, I was not using Photoshop – everything happened naturally. I booked an airplane ticket with a European airline and got an email from them suggesting to pick a seat and use my Facebook or LinkedIn account to identify myself, which I did. This is how my pretty face got into the seat 15F. The next question is if it was a smart or stupid thing to do? Initially, I selected 15F hoping that the flight won’t be fully booked, and no one will want to take the seat in the middle (15C), and I’ll have some extra room during my flight to Europe.

But now, after identifying myself, most likely some 300-pound LinedIn aficionado will take 15C on purpose even if we’re not connected just yet. No thank you very much. I’m not going to take chances. In the virtual world I can easily ignore annoying people, but being trapped with an unknown talkative facebooker for 8 hours doesn’t seem too appealing to me. Luckily, this airline let me delete my LinkedIn profile from the seat map, so I’m flying incognito, yay!