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Social Networking in the Digital Age
An anonymous reader writes "It used to be if you wanted to win more friends, influence more people or make more money, you bought one of those self-improvement tomes and tried to pump up your personality.
These days, all you have to do is go online and join a "social networking" site. The pumping will be done for you."
Just terminated my Orkut account : I don't like to be asked to quantify my level of friendship with people, it is only my business.
I'd rather keep meeting people IRL, there are still much more people offline than online, after all.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
If you want to see the social network idea extended to music, I suggest you check out my site Musicmobs. It links users together not only by the music they listen to, but also creating a web of "favorite users".
My goal is to make a place where people can not only find new music, but learn more about the music that they already listen to.
I've considered joining such online social circles in the past because I, like many others, do enjoy online interaction. I spend many hours per day talking to people on AIM or some other service, I maintain a livejournal, and as I'm doing right now, I enjoy posting on sites like Slashdot. However, I've yet to actually do it. Why? Because the people I would really be interested in having join along with me are already on AIM, or they simply aren't online very often.
Existing chat services already serve this purpose quite well. I have a number of contacts on my lists which I personally don't know very well, but they are friends of friends who I might talk to once a year. The only real difference with these sites is that the process is automated, in some sense or another. I can see the purpose to them and I would like to see a concept like this take off, but I just can't see anything like that really getting established and lasting any length of time.
KappaStone
> The pumping will be done for you.
That hasn't been my experience. I signed up for the Monster.com networking thing, and all it does is send me periodic messages stating "other people who are like you". What am I supposed to do with this?
Crap. I get far more kudos from people e-mailing me to ask about or compliment source code and articles I post on my web site, and often times they contribute code back to me.
1. Many still prefer human face to face (or any other body part to any other body part
2. Identity theft. You can register yourself as Bill Gates, with BG's photo, on Friendster. Chances are, you'll get away with it.
3. Abuse by trolls. Need I say more?
I keep my personal life well off the internet. I do it mainly for privacy and security reasons.
Friendster, in my eyes, is a vast spam engine. I get dozens of emails from people I barely know as acquiantances trying to be my "friends" on Friendster. No thanks. I know who my friends are. I don't want a website to remind me.
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Nothing to see here
Just this week I met up with some people from Orkut. I wrote about my experience for those interested.
I know a lot of people on slashdot make fun of social networks, but trust me, if you are new to a city and don't know many people there, it's nice to join a network of (mostly) real people as opposed to some anonymous bulliten board.
-Colin
nobody's registering, just going there to try to, and being shown the door.
From the site:
orkut is unique, because it's an organically growing network of trusted friends. That way we won't grow too large, too quickly and everyone will have at least one person to vouch for them.
If you know someone who is a member of orkut, that person can invite you to join as well. If you don't know an orkut member, wait a bit and most likely you soon will.
We look forward to having you as part of the orkut community.
We need a Slashdot Orkut whore!
All the fervor has skeptics talking of a social networking bubble and its inevitable collapse. While such speculation is premature, issues do have to be resolved -- functionality and privacy concerns among them -- before the sector can be judged a safe bet.
Ummm, no. the skeptics are skeptical because we heard all the same hoo haa back around 1999. And investment is not profit something these dot-commies still don't understand.
The article then goes on to blather:
Perhaps the strongest arguments for social networking's success has nothing to do with the bottom-line success of the companies behind the sites. Rather it's one of those unintended consequences that's no less welcome and needed for being unexpected.
First off, that is an atrociously written paragraph. What is IT'S? "Social networking" or the "bottom line success of the companies"? But, never mind...
Secondly, these companies are having millions of dollars poured down their gullet by VCs. That is NOT bottom line success. That is investment on the prediction of bottom line success, but we ALL know where that little train went back around March 2001...
The article is just another rah-rah bit of internet blather - so five minutes ago (actually five years ago) it's kind of sad, really.
The fact is this: if you want to build a network of professional relationships, you have to get off your fat ass and go meet people. There are many organisations for just about every concievable interest. Join one. You have to go out and meet people. And if you're a loser at that, then eventually you'll be a loser online as well, because all the online thing can do is facilitate the development of f2f where the real business goes down.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Having to "rate" my friends could possibly be the worst concept to hit social networking
Not at all. The idea is a good one, if the social network is to have any useful value for interpersonal networking, it has to know the strength of the links. If I'm trying to chart a path to Bob, the network needs to know which are the "close-friend" links, which are more likely to hold up and be worth something.
I won't get very far trying to use a chain of 3 barely acquainted people to get from Alice to Bob
you could forgo the "getting to know you" part and go out "toothin" as described in one of the front page articles of wired.com
... in there with her shirt undone. 'This beats the crossword,' she said. And we took it from there."
Brits Going at It Tooth and Nail By Daniel Terdiman
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,62687,00. html
02:00 AM Mar. 22, 2004 PT
The Brits sure are randy.
First came dogging, an underground swinging scene where couples and sometimes third or fourth parties engage in public sex for an exhibitionist thrill.
And now comes "toothing," where strangers on trains and buses and at bars and concerts hook up for clandestine sex by text messaging each other with their Bluetooth-enabled cell phones or PDAs.
"I've always loved the idea of random sexual encounters, but have never felt brave enough to go to (sex) parties," says Steve, a toother from Hitchin, England. "The beauty of toothing is that there's no pressure. I was reluctant to send messages at first, but the standard greeting, which I found out from (an online toothing forum) is so innocuous there is no chance of offending anyone by sending a random message."
According to the Beginner's Guide to Toothing, the online FAQ written by a man who calls himself Toothy Toothing, toothing is "a form of anonymous sex with strangers -- usually on some form of transport or enclosed area such as a conference or training seminar.... Users 'discover' other computers or phones in the vicinity and then send a speculative message. The usual greeting is: 'Toothing?'"
Toothing takes advantage of the capabilities of Bluetooth, a wireless technology that allows two devices to communicate with each other over short distances. Many mobile phones and PDAs now have built-in Bluetooth functionality and allow users to automatically locate other such devices in their vicinity.
"I live in a commuting town outside London," says Jon, or Toothy Toothing. "The train journey in the morning and evening is slow, tiresome and packed full of miserable people halfheartedly prodding at shiny new tech. You recognize faces within your tiny half-hour community, but you never talk to them."
So last November, Jon remembers, he received a text message on the train from a device called "Angela." That night, he went home and figured out how to respond to incoming text messages and did so the next day.
"Cut a long story short, the messages got more and more flirty -- and after a while I had a good idea of who she was, and I think she'd worked out who I was -- and a couple of days later she dared me to meet next to the toilets at the mainline station we were heading to. We met, we fucked and toothing was born."
Steve's introduction to toothing was similar. He had just bought himself a new mobile phone when he was pinged by someone on his commuter line. "Bored? Talk to me," the message read.
"I thought it was some kind of SMS spam," says Steve. "I was messing with the phone's settings, trying to work out what to do when I got the second message, 'I can see you struggling. Meet me in the toilet and I'll show you what to do.'"
Intrigued, he says, he did as bid.
"It was unlocked," he remembers. "A girl was
Steve and hundreds, if not thousands, of others have formed a loose-knit community via Jon's Toothing forum. Although the majority of them are men, there are also many women on the forum, such as "Mysterious Girl," "annie 2uesday," "CandyGrrrl" and others. Members discuss the etiquette of toothing, the best locations to hook up with a toothing partner and whom they hope will be the first celebrities to get involved.
Sometimes they even have a little fun with language.
Under a posting titled "3's company?" one member asked, "Anyone got any views on the statistical chance of a toothing threesome? Would it be Threething?"
In any case, toothing seems to give its participants an exercise in figur
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the same vortex of stupidity that caught us all in the Dot-Bomb Era.
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Your viewpoint is a little too limited. Think about it as a pyramid scheme. There are a small number of people in very elevated positions that made schloads of money off of the Dot-Bomb Era. To them it wasn't a vortex of stupidity. To them it was nothing short of sheer brilliance supported by the herd mentality in society. Those top-level investors led the public into huge investments, funneled the cash to themselves, disappeared via the back route, and left the rest of the economy holding the bag full of dogpoop.
The social networking and VC sites are operating on the same premise. Hype up the service, milk it for all it's worth, and then duck out the back door once the critical mass of incoming money has been reached. When the small controlling minority at the top leaves (rich) the rest of us will lose our investments (poor).
It's really no different than what the banks did back in the 20s. They encouraged the government first to funnel taxpayer money into the system. This inflated the system. Because the system was inflated the private investors began contributing heavily. Once the critical mass was reached in 1929 the top investors walked off with the profits and couldn't be found. The banks closed their doors and said the gov't had the money. The gov't said the money was with the investment brokers. The investment brokers said they had loaned the money out to small businesses.
Twelve thousand cups, three peas, and the real magician is hiding in some big mansion out in Nevada.
Pyramid schemes, pyramid schemes. All I see in America are pyramid schemes.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80