BEFORE: I would upload pictures on a photo site and then switch to my email account to send my friends the link. I would upload my videos to another website and then go to my email account and paste the link to a note to my friends so they watch it. I would Twitter and if my friends remember to check then they can follow me. I blog and if they have time they can check to see if I have new updates. Or, add both in an Atom or RSS reader such as Google Reader so you don’t have to jump from site to site.
The precursor to the now popular social networking sites must have been Yahoo Groups and I have ownership of three e-groups, two which are work-related and another one for grade school classmates. In many ways, I have proven that the e-group is a highly efficient and cheap online tool to stay connected with friends. It relies however pretty much on hands-on management and administration of each e-group, reason why I have chosen to annihilate some of my less active e-groups in the past. Setting up birthday reminders, registration of email addresses of users and ensuring it stays active can be extremely tedious.
Funny that until I had Friendster exercise its option to spam all my contacts, I thought all social network sites were all the same. OK, enough DUH’s from you dear readers! So I was stuck with Friendster for a while…. like four years. I thought I had all that I needed there – my 50+ friends and the new feature to share or limit access to the limited number of pictures I was allowed to upload to my site. I opened an account with multiply.com and wasn’t impressed. MySpace freaked me out. And then…enter Facebook.
I opened an account with Facebook after an invite a year ago and then forgot about it. Exploring other options after falling out of love with Friendster, I decided to update Facebook and was quite impressed with its easy but powerful interface. What? I have unlimited number of picture albums that I can upload on the site itself? And did you say that for each album I can control privacy settings? And really quick upload of videos? Straight to the site did you say, with the same privacy settings? Yeah, I know – DUH. And because each user registers their own birthdays and other information, the reminders to connected friends become automatic without effort. And so Facebook it was. Goodbye Friendster and farewell to my contacts who I hoped would follow me to my migrated site. Unfortunately Friendster, of course, remains the more preferred social network site in the Philippines.
The good thing about Facebook is that it also integrates into its platform my Twitter updates, creates a badge of my Flickr pictures and if I wanted to, choose from the more than 5, 500 other applications relevant and not to make my page as unique as I am. Some of my New York friends and some other friends from far and beyond have joined my friends list on the site. Whenever I send an invite they always respond to me to join them instead in their own social network.
I really believe to make it worth its two clicks people can belong to different social networks but still be able to interact with each other virtually. What I think would make it perfect is when everyone’s separate social networks could link up to each other to create one huge community of internet denizens. Yeah, sort of like a United Nations sort of an online world but with less of the controversy and the politics.
In a perfect world, anything and everything is of course a possibility. For the meantime, I wish those I left behind in Friendster can reconsider and join me at Facebook!
The precursor to the now popular social networking sites must have been Yahoo Groups and I have ownership of three e-groups, two which are work-related and another one for grade school classmates. In many ways, I have proven that the e-group is a highly efficient and cheap online tool to stay connected with friends. It relies however pretty much on hands-on management and administration of each e-group, reason why I have chosen to annihilate some of my less active e-groups in the past. Setting up birthday reminders, registration of email addresses of users and ensuring it stays active can be extremely tedious.
Funny that until I had Friendster exercise its option to spam all my contacts, I thought all social network sites were all the same. OK, enough DUH’s from you dear readers! So I was stuck with Friendster for a while…. like four years. I thought I had all that I needed there – my 50+ friends and the new feature to share or limit access to the limited number of pictures I was allowed to upload to my site. I opened an account with multiply.com and wasn’t impressed. MySpace freaked me out. And then…enter Facebook.
I opened an account with Facebook after an invite a year ago and then forgot about it. Exploring other options after falling out of love with Friendster, I decided to update Facebook and was quite impressed with its easy but powerful interface. What? I have unlimited number of picture albums that I can upload on the site itself? And did you say that for each album I can control privacy settings? And really quick upload of videos? Straight to the site did you say, with the same privacy settings? Yeah, I know – DUH. And because each user registers their own birthdays and other information, the reminders to connected friends become automatic without effort. And so Facebook it was. Goodbye Friendster and farewell to my contacts who I hoped would follow me to my migrated site. Unfortunately Friendster, of course, remains the more preferred social network site in the Philippines.
The good thing about Facebook is that it also integrates into its platform my Twitter updates, creates a badge of my Flickr pictures and if I wanted to, choose from the more than 5, 500 other applications relevant and not to make my page as unique as I am. Some of my New York friends and some other friends from far and beyond have joined my friends list on the site. Whenever I send an invite they always respond to me to join them instead in their own social network.
I really believe to make it worth its two clicks people can belong to different social networks but still be able to interact with each other virtually. What I think would make it perfect is when everyone’s separate social networks could link up to each other to create one huge community of internet denizens. Yeah, sort of like a United Nations sort of an online world but with less of the controversy and the politics.
In a perfect world, anything and everything is of course a possibility. For the meantime, I wish those I left behind in Friendster can reconsider and join me at Facebook!