In the pub the other evening I overhead a friend describe Facebook as “the new MySpace”. For many reasons this was quite depressing but, despite Facebook being nearly as old as myspace, truly accurate. Of course, technically, Facebook is far superior to Myspace, although that’s not saying much, but it’s just another social network nightmare, and that’s it. Users of these hopelessly pointless systems are easily classifiable:
- Kids
- People who want to flirt with people, with the pathetic hope that they may meet the boy/girl of their dreams
- People who want to flirt with people, and hope they may get some anonymous sex out of it
- Old farts who are desperately trying to cling onto their youth – sometimes literally
You don’t need me to point out which category you or I fall into.
Still, it’s interesting to see the same people migrating from one network to another en mass and leaving the same chirpy, flirty, dropping on each others pages. Me included…The real users (ie types 1-3 above) have the same conversations in “private” using IM systems but they still feel the need to talk in public too. Frequently people use the public spaces to allude to private conversations and in-jokes. Why ? Marking territory perhaps ? All very odd.
The only one of these things I’ve ever got into is flickr, and that’s probably because it primarily serves another purpose: to host your pictures using their bandwidth and with their excellent tools. But now and again it’s nice to have a look around the groups and meet like minded people.
The best thing is that Facebook will import this blog entry automatically together with the title.
It’s the little things.
