Sosyal networking

I'm not much of a fan of social networking services such as Friendster, MySpaces, or Orkut. I even had to read up on Wikipedia to know these sites, except for Friendster of course, which probably reached its peak last year 2004. I don't know how popular it is now or if it's become passe already.

I remember way, way back in 1997, it was the time when I first got online using my Netscape 3.0. I kept getting email from a sixdegrees.com, which is of course based on the theory that I will quote (from Wikipedia again):

Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called Chains.

(And from this of course, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon)

In my opinion it was one of the first incarnations of organized spamming that probably spawned Internet viral marketing. It was a fun and novel thing to participate in at first but then I was reminded of chain letters. My sister got one for real, as in a snail-mail from a "friend". I read it and saw right through the scam the first time. The giveaway was the "success stories" in the very same mail that recounted the incidences of good luck to those who had sent the letter and bad luck to those who didn't. "Mr. X sent this email and tripled his wealth in a matter of ...". An obvious waste of time of course, apart from simply being annoying.

So anyway, when Friendster entered the scene a few years ago, I dismissed it as a fad. A well-executed one, though, and building over the ruins of sixdegrees. Almost everyone I know has a Friendster account (or two) and it seems to be going along fine although the new developments are a lacking in uniqueness: photo albums, blogs, and the like. Anyway, if I need to take a peek into the network, I can still use my old buddy Mark's account that Noel made.

As a postscript to this, I have tried using Yahoo 360 and sent invites to anyone who cares; but clearly, it's a piece of sh*t. I don't really need an integrated service to unify blogging, RSS feed management, photo sharing, and whatever else I do online.