July 20, 2006

Social Notworking

"Social networking" websites are all the rage these days. I think most people I know, particularly in my age group, have been a member of at least one at some point, even if they don't recognise them as such. The famous ones that actually went by that name were Orkut and Friendster, whose main basic premise was that you signed up, told the site who you knew, and it told you who they knew. You could search for other people based on various criteria, for reasons of employment, dating, or whatever. The principle was sound, but the whole thing seems kind of pointless to me.

MySpace is at least a little more directed — the site was originally a music promotion thing, where bands could showcase their tracks, maintain a blog, etc, as you'd hope they might on their conventional websites, but this way MySpace would provide all the technological wizardry and the artists or their promoters could concentrate on the content. Now, of course, it's degenerated into the same sordid evilness that chatrooms and web forums did before it, where naive young teenagers are courted by seedy middle-aged men pretending to be rockstars/teenagers/priests, kidnapped, abused and murdered, on an almost hourly basis [Source: Daily Mail statistics department] . Apparently bebo is very similar to MySpace, but I must admit I've not looked cllosely at it.

And then there's sites like last.fm, which have no reason to provide "friends lists" and "groups", except that people seem to want them. They add nothing to the value of the site, at least for me, but still I play along and add people I know on the site as friends. I dread to think what the people behind last.fm are doing with all this data about who my friends are, though.

On the positive side, Facebook doesn't seem to have succumbed to the usual social networking rot just yet; I suspect this is because they limit who can sign up, to people with university email addresses, or email addresses with specific employers. And signing up with such an address only gets you access to the profiles of people in the same "network", in general. These restrictions a) keep the annoying kids out, and b) stop people getting randomly stalked/harrassed quite so much, a win all round.

To be honest, I'm only really on Facebook so that, in 5 years time, I'll still have some chance of being in touch with the people I went to uni with. Experience of leaving university before tells me I'm unlikely to stay in touch with more than a couple of my contemporaries by conventional means. It's a bit like a pre-arranged version of Friends Reunited I suppose...

Are there any other social networking type sites out there of interest? Do they all suck as much as each other? Answers on a comment, usual address...

Posted by James at 17:39 | Comments (1) | TrackBack
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