I don't need to follow my sister on facebook, I just meet up with her to talk. I really don't need to see what statuses by strangers my long-time friends "liked", I'd much rather just meet up with them in some interesting place for a vacation. And if I am connected to them online, I have no use for a notice that a friend is DJing at such and such club on the other side of the earth in 5 days, but I'd like to share music we are working on or books we are reading, so I connect with them on platforms designed to share those things.
Online socializing also provides the opportunity to be exposed the ideas, work and output of people who I couldn't meet any other way. As a result, when I'm online I seek out strangers who are working in domains that interest me, read what they say, check out their work, discuss things with them and collaborate on creating things.
So, in my situation, I relate to the author's approach: I seek out content. I strongly prefer discussion-centric platforms like forums and the only social networks I use heavily are either domain-specific, like goodreads or linkedin, or content-centric, like github, soundcloud, vimeo and even, to some degree at least, twitter. Friendster, Myspace and Facebook have never been interesting to me.
It's just a different perspective. Different people simply have different interests and differing socialization patterns. Personally, I find these differences fascinating.