Stayin' Alive (a long lost friend posted to my wall)

The web has been abuzz lately with "OpenSocial" reactions. Tim O'Reily, no surprise, commented his way to the head of the line (go Tim go).
As pundits ponder the future of the Yahoo-Pipe-ization of social network (data), and (coincidentally) so many begin griping about all the FaceBook spam they get (from their "friend," Sprite), I've had a quiet experience unfold, and with it a minor revelation.

Start here: remember when email was new, and you "found" and caught up with old friends, scattered to the winds? Maybe you began emailing with a sibling, or a parent, and found your bond with family stronger (shock & awe). Remember the awkward feeling, at a party, listening to someone yet to get an email account complaining loudly (because we all must agree, after all) that the world was becoming reduced to bytes, and where's the humanity? (You felt awkward because you were still tingling or giddy, or relieved, from the email you got just as you were walking out the door to come to the party...)

Go here: Well, I'm talking with people about their time online, their use of networks like FaceBook, and they're saying the same thing: this is how i get that tingly or giddy, or relieved feeling... this is where I find the people who (gulp) make me feel whole.
My Point: where's email? It's well known that email is, to the 19-24 and 13-18 demographic, "something I do for my parents, but only if they call and tell me they emailed me something." For fogies. But what about the 30-50 year-olds? We all HAVE email accounts - we use them more than we did 5 or 10 yrs ago. But 90% of the time, you don't get the tingling or giddy, or relieved experience from an email. You're on Match.com, or FaceBook, Classmates or Eons.

Something unraveled with email -- as a cultural facility/utility (and source of tingly). I'm just rambling aloud here, but obviously spam has something to do with it. Also, that we don't post our emails where it can get spidered, so old friends can find us (which we did gleefully on our first web pages, circa '95); again, reactions to spam.
And then there's the email factor: it's email. When you want to track down an old friend, you're happy to cautiously craft the re-introduction, attach a photo ("I'm the heavier one on the far left...") and launch it, as though all the way to mars -- then bite your nails for a few days, hoping it "arrived." But from there, it quickly becomes a back-and-forth, tag-team happy-slapping of responses. Doesn't really sound like email, eh? Messaging, instant messaging, delayed messaging; posting to walls, ...I send, awaiting your availability. (And what's with the "send" imagery. "I've never mailed a letter with a stamp in my life," a highschool senior told me recently).

So what's really starting to bug me now is that a person's appetite to connect (after 20 yrs; or, after 20 minutes), and also to "be listed in the book," is in some ways LESS supported now than it was in 1995. (Yes, I just said that.) Finding people in FB is a pain; figuring out how & where to find people is a pain. Search engines are kind of useless; MySpace gets crawled, but you get so much spam you ignore long lost friends trying to track you down there...
Worse, I fear spam evolution will keep pace with all these speak easy, bouncer-at-the-door closed networks that (however briefly) really let real people find their people and do what it's all about...
"Hi - it's me."
"Really? Wow! Have a seat."
"I saw you, and just had to come over and say 'hey.'"
"SO glad you did..."

Online.

And after all, isn't this what it's really about?