social networking

I had been on friendster for a while. Friendster the social networking site that really launched a thousand ships, which in the US has been drowned out by myspace and facebook, but has a rekindled life in southeast asia, more specifically the Philippines.

I got a myspace page to keep in touch with some cousins, and then got a facebook page to keep up with some other cousins. After using them for a while, my favorite is facebook.

Friendster is ok if people actually bother to update their pages. So it's similar to where most people's blogs and previous to that personal websites ended up, the haven't been updated in years pile of harddrive server space. If people want to do a web archeological dig, it would be on all those dated websites. But having been the first, then it's population i've found is mostly late 20s, early 30 something folks, at least in the US. Oh, and Philippine Filipinos. i did manage to reconnect with people from high school and college.

myspace, I knew I would eventually dislike simply because of the layout and the unending advertising that seem to bombard you everywhere you go. But myspace became the hot spot for bands and other musical people, so everyone with a guitar or who thinks they can sing, is on it. I find most people's pages myspace layout completely obnoxious as in the early web html scripting days when we all learned to make text "flash" in horrible loud colors, when we thought white text on black background was the coolest thing, kind of obnoxious. And even worse, people have learned to spam on myspace which makes it even less worth my time. But this is where much of the fam is, so I stay.

facebook started out as something to keep in touch with family, but then someone from work found me on the network, and then another person. And then Ernesto found me, then Mr. Carbonator found me and soon after the other tech savvy poet Mr. Vince Gotera, and so on and so forth. So by far, my group of friends here is perhaps my most diverse in the sense they are the most diverse in terms of which part of my life they come from as well as diverse in terms of age/work/where they live, etc. And while I really like the facebook layout, I like writing on people's walls and i like the newsfeed that updates what people are doing on their facebook pages, part of me is a bit apprehensive in terms of do I want people I know from work to know this part about me? Then again, I work in technology, so it shouldn't be a surprise that these people are here.

Unlike others who use the social networks to meet people, I usually only approve people that I know in person or know online through some project. So I don't really have anyone on my friend lists I only know from their social network page.

People claim you get to know alot about a person really quickly, but I tend to disagree. Certainly you know alot of chit-chat information (fav movies, books, tv, etc), but not sure if you really learn that much more. Besides, you assume that they're all telling the truth about themselves.

We'll see where this goes. In the meantime, i find it rather entertaining this evolution of online personas.