I'm so old school

I'm getting a headache. Been trolling the facebook and myspace pages of my cousins. It's interesting how you can tell how "old" a person is on the net partially by which internet social networks they peruse. LOL! Facebook seems to be the latest and greatest thing for nanosecond as people abandon their myspace pages, and before that it was friendster. I mostly do it to see their latest pictures and what they have to say about themselves.

I was talking to one of my cousin's parents the other day. I sit at a convenient age group between him and his kid. His kid, my cousin who is just getting into his teens, asked his dad if he could get a facebook page. He's tired of myspace and facebook is where "everyone" is going. His dad was a bit reluctant, trying to protect his son from the potential crazies he knows are on the internet. He should know, he's been on the internet for 20 years now. I think I saw a list once that said you would be an "ubergeek" if you had an email before 1995. Yeah, so what if I did, what's it to ya? ok, maybe I am an ubergeek.

Anyway, this blog/blogger would definitely be for "old" people as "email" is now considered "ancient" way of communicating has defined by the generation only born in the last decade. Oh and remember way back when, when people actually had to write html to create their own webpages and post to newsgroups using specific newsgroup readers that had no pictures at all?

The social networks work by trying to combine every outlet of social internet communication: chat, email, blogging, which easily links everyone to all their other friends who have one too. Facebook, from what I can tell, is the latest and greatest because there's a bit more "privacy" in that you can only search the networks you are in and definitely less annoying ads to look at. But they'll abandon those too until 1) the next latest and greatest thing comes out or 2) they've got way more better things to do with their time.

Lots of people saying stuff. Not exactly sure what they're saying. Not even sure if anyone is listening either. Readership is always this amorphous imaginated cloud. Well, except for the 50 or so people who seem to check out this blog every week. You know who you are even though I don't.

The social network generation have a different sense of what they think "privacy" should be. Alot of them believe that their section of the internet, their pool of friends, is the private part of the internet. Hate to break it to them that anything and everything on the net is public or at least has the potential to go public, even email. The recent UCLA hack proves that. You want "privacy"? Unplug the network from your machine.

Though you could say that even before the internet privacy wasn't really protected. What has changed is how much information and how quickly this information can be gone without anyone knowing it. It's one thing to notice that a stack of papers from your desk are missing, but you'll never see your disk quota diminish. You can see that a lock as been tampered with, but you won't necessarily see where you were hacked as you login to your computer.

At UCLA their computer was secure. The other computer that had access to it wasn't.

A few years ago the internet was about accumulating data, gathering information. Now it's about moving data, sifting through data, securing data. Not so much what the information is, but how it moves around. How do we cull the information we want in the way we want it. The iPod did that for music. The big technology trends will continue along that line.

And me? I'll probably still be emailing and blogging. I'm just nostalgic that way.