The social media hysteria / Home

It seems more and more people are jumping onto Twitter – well most of my friends are anyways. For me I seem to move from one social network to another, I’ve gone from Spaces to MySpace to Facebook and to Twitter etc. I’ve given up Spaces because it’s friends network wasn’t strong and was too integrated into Microsoft’s own technologies – this at a time I despised Windows Media Player. So MySpace was my drink and I was sipping it much like a fine wine, I don’t drink wine. I never really got into the pester random people mantra of MySpace, and believe me I tried – oh I did try. Most MySpace users would do anything to get attention and build they’re so-called-friend lists to reach astronomical proportions, we call them MySpace whores, but funny enough no one actually wanted to be friends with you [or me] and usually ended up getting the wrong kind of attention.

So now enter Facebook which tries to solve these issues. One of Facebook’s strengths is people are binded through relationships which gives more emphasis that the link you and your friend have is real, you either worked with the person, went to school with them or randomly bumped then when in a nightclub. The other strength, and one which still holds me as an active user is I get notifications and get to keep tabs on what my friends are doing. This is through change one’s status or posting on someone’s wall etc, and I get these updates without having to interact with that person to get it. It’s a very unsocial way to be social I know but it’s a convenient and effortless way to know what everyone in your world is doing. MySpace copied Facebook on this but I can’t stand that intense user interface make us use. Facebook seems to actually want to make people engage one another and constantly introduce new ones to do it, first of these was the ability to have third-party apps. These apps allowed users make Facebook work the way they wanted it work [as long as it existed] and extended the service with unlimited potential, MySpace soon followed suite again. Other mechanisms was integration to other services such as Digg and Flickr and even allow people to add RSS feeds. This I only just discovered recently but think it’s a blessing, turning Facebook into your social aggregator. Mind you I found it a little difficult to find and use so I hope they simplify and and make it easily accessible.

So now the net is buzzing with Twitter, the little service with big prospect. It seems everyone is twittering, even when they shouldn’t. I think Twitter can be/is a great tool for the modern web, helping you voice out to the world, but needs to be more feature packed. Twitter is open and makes it easy to integrate with which is what has helped it boom with success but it’s become too dependent on third-parties that should either of them fall the whole ecosystem will be destroyed.

The media seems to always be the last to hear about these types of services with little to know clue upon discovery what the hell they do, but that doesn’t stop them from blabbering on about them sounding professional and that actually hurts the user’s expectation. I think we’re at a point that social networks are not new no more and are as common as email and porn. Sure there will always be new innovations and new players but fuck come on, iTunes didn’t get this kind of response when it slaughtered every other media player when it was released. Get over it now.