My Digital Life

YES, I'm finally in Facebook.. and I have been warned that it's addictive. It is.

But to be honest, I've actually been avoiding creating other (what they call) social networks (SN) accounts for a few reasons:

1. It's gonna take a long time to rebuild your contacts there. Obviously the rival wouldn't let you import contacts from their competitors.
2. Why would I want to maintain two (or more) accounts?
   
3. I don't have time for this crap
4. I remember a period where SNs boomed and it used to tick me off when invites flood my inbox so
   
5. It was a boycott.

A familiar sight, ainnit?

And what's with the supposedly guilt inducing messages at the end?
If you are not interested, just ignore this email. Flickr won't bug you again and there's nothing special you have to do.
What, I'm gonna feel so bad that I didn't oblige in trying out your service against others that I might just have a go and who knows, it might be cool.

Now, that was talking about just one SN. We all know that the mac-daddy of all SNs was Friendster. But today, people have so many to choose from. Seeing that I obviously knew squat about anything outside this SN shell that I've cleverly crafted, I did some research myself to see what's so special about the rest.

Friendster : Boasts a community of over 30 million users worldwide. Has evolved into a dating site more than anything which imo just isn't relevant anymore. Targets 20-30 year olds.
MySpace : The current top-dog of SNs (rated by activity) targeting oogly-eyed teenagers. And even
Multiply : For "regular people, who lead regular lives". Meaning for those who wants to do a little of each.
Blogger: has become a type of SN with active blogging communities. There's also
Flickr : For professional photographers. Finally, not forgetting the infamous
YouTube: For people who love shooting videos etc. Devan, the king of series has even converted to what I call the YouWikiTube. He searches for all his clips (not those clips) in YouTube and anything he finds interesting he Wikipedias it. And in turn, he YouTubes anything interesting he stumbles upon in Wikipedia. (Ahuh, so sue me for using WikiP and YouT as verbs.) It's practically impossible to remain bored this way. By the way, if there were a stock for YouTube, I'd beg, borrow, buy and/or steal to buy as much as I can. I salute the founders.

I stumbled upon this very interesting read titled "Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?" by Danah Boyd. It revealed a very in-depth analysis of the evolution of Friendster as well as its downfall. On the other hand, she studies how MySpace ingeniously overturned Friendster's weaknesses and made it their very own strengths which contributed to the many pleasant surprises that I saw in Facebook

1. For one, the +Share album/photo overcame the redundancy of posting up similar photos. Not to mention the fact that we could easily label photos with users' names.
2. And so long as you complete your particulars, all this labelling can be done systematically without retyping anything.
3. Personalization, personalization.. personalization.
4. I'm guessing many more that I have yet to discover
   

The most important is actually point #3. The enabling of regular Joe's such as you and I to design widgets or themes to be used by other people is simply brilliant. For example, the SuperPoke widget that enables you to do more than poke someone. Another cool widget which stole another hour of my life was the iLike widget which enables you to put music and video clips on your profile. I also played the Music Challenge which is like the iPod music game. (i.e. Guess the title of the song or artist who sang it). And I know that's more or less only 10% of what there are.

"MySpace launched at a time when the enthusiastic surfers wanted to find more kitsch crap. They jumped on MySpace, created all sorts of culture and profiles complete with massive amounts of media, and helped figure out how to hack the system to make the profiles more expressive. MySpace didn't stop them. As a result, the cultural enthusiasm was nurtured and it grew and grew and grew..."
So it's obvious SNs that flourished were those that didn't limit creativity, further emphasizing my previous point.

Some of you probably wonder what's in it for free-to-use services such as friendster. Well, word has it that after receiving $3.1 million in funding only a few months ago, social networking veteran Friendster has received another $10 million from Palo Alto-based DAG Ventures. Bet ya didn't know that. I'm pretty interested to see the improvements to come from this fat cheque. Oh, they have even successfully won a social networking patent:

“The new Friendster patent covers the basic steps involved in joining a social network: entering a personal description and relationships to other users, mapping relationships and degrees of separation, and connecting to others through these friends.”

Wth. Desperate measures perhaps?

Nevermind that and back to my time-wasting in Facebook.. Actually, it's gonna be impossible for me to explain in detail something that is (and will probably continue) expanding. I imagine the day where another SN revolution takes place and changes the way we talk and meet people. If this technology isn't already advanced and thus convenient enough, what's next? Seeing that two/five senses (visual and audio) are down, the next would probably be say, being able to smell your friend's favorite scents? Taste his favorite food? Feel his favorite shirt. The signs are already there with the introduction of Smell-o-visions and Internet-based Fragrance enhanced Movies. It's either that or Johnnys like you and I who will be heading this change.

Indeed, the world is getting more fascinating as it gets smaller.

Ailee ft. David Choi proclaiming their love for YouTube. And dayum, she'd definitely have my vote for American Idol.. =D