Misadventures in social networking

Today I decided to snoop about some of the finest social networking site the Internets have to offer. First it was off to MySpace to see what all the fuss was. MySpace has a truly awful search engine. Don't even try quotes in your search. My first successful search on "Fullerton Public Library" (no quotes, mind you) turned up many places that had all of the words present in the profiles, but it had nothing to do with the library. For example, Joe Bob Public graduated from Cal State Fullerton in 1994 and watches public access cable shows when not maintaining his large library of comic books. What a charming false drop. I was fortunate to find the profiles of some fellow employees of the library as well as the TAG (teen advisory group) profile. Nice work, everybody.

Before bidding adieu to MySpace I decided to see how the latest crop of president candidates reach out to the electoral through this forum. Not only did Barack Obama have more donors than Hillary Clinton, but he also has more MySpace friends! If this isn't the smell of victory, I don't know what is. Both sites, however, are easy to read (no crazy wallpaper and/or clashing colors). Unfortunately, like Cylons, there are many copies. Anybody can make a site for a candidate, and some have done a good job at confusing the casual potential voter. Watch the spelling the names in the URL if you have any doubts over the authenticity of a profile.

I moved on to Facebook, where I am currently faceless. The layout is much cleaner than MySpace. That is good. Not so good is that I cannot jump in and start randomly spying at people's profiles. In fact, I cannot even show you the account I just created. I guess you will have to join my network or become my friend to see it. Since this sucks a lot of the spontaneity out of the experience, this may explain the diminished popularity of Facebook next to MySpace. We want our instant gratification!

Moving right along to Twitter... When I plan to make my life an open book, I will thank Twitter for making it all possible. Now if there was some way to send Twitter messages in my sleep. "I am asleep" - I would say...no...think with brain waves. My initial impressions here aren't too incredibly negative. Functionality over multiple platforms is one of the trademarks of Web 2.0, so Twitter is definitely part of this family. In fact, it brings back warm fuzzy memories of college, using a crummy old system called "Broadcast", which we students liked using more than the phone to do things like flirt and meet up for Chicken Finger Night at the dining hall. That's 1998 talking, buster!

Looking to the future, I trolled over to something still developing called MyLifeBrand. Again, the goal is to keep things looking a bit more organized than MySpace, but I wonder if it may actually be a case of entering too late. I would like to see the inner workings of this system, but right now I need a sponsor to go any farther than the "About Us" page. An aggregator of the different social networking site would be valuable. That way I can put this blog, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Gmail tools, etc. into one big toy chest. Right now the closest thing I have is del.icio.us, but I just looked at my sorry list on that site and I don't think it is particularly representative of who I am. However, in the way VHS vanquished Beta, the best functioning, best looking inventions often still end up as the big losers.

In closing, I left a trail of breadcrumbs behind so you can see the mess I made. Here is me on MySpace, something I put together a few months ago so people would stop bothering me about not having a profile. It is what it is. Again, if you are with Facebook and you know who I am, try looking me up and see what happens. I'm so alone right now! I have a single word in my Twitter profile right now, which pretty much says it all until I get this post published. Now if there was some way to send Twitter messages in my sleep. "I am asleep" - I would say...no...think. Anyway if you want to become my first follower, go there right now! Deals like this don't last!