Facebook. Ah. The social networking site of the moment, never mind if the Beacon system fucked everything up for them a little while back. What makes me insanely happy though is that Mark Zuckerberg (it’s creator) seems to be this really nice guy whose business card says “I have my own company, bitch” (alas, I hear he removed that!).
Loads of people will already know that I absolutely HATE Orkut. Nothing personal against Google, but I’ve love to hate the creeps who find their way to Orkut – a site which’ll never be respectable outside of Brazil and India if things stay the way they are. So well, since that post I was pretty pissed with Orkut, and looking for places to move to…
- Yahoo! 360: Cute name, boring service. They sorta tried to come up with something ‘killer’ by integrating everything into something. IMHO, it’s a bloody bad social networking site. However, having said that, it IS a bloody brilliant social blogging site. That’s what it should try to market itself as.
- Yahoo! M.A.S.H: Yahoo!’s new (and more sensible, I hope) social networking baby. Fun questions in profiles I’ve heard, like “What kind of an animal are you?”. Sadly though, I don’t have an invite to check this amazing service out. IMHO, Mash, when opened up from beta, is gonna leave all other networks standing with frogs in their hands.
- MySpace: Nobody bothers about this behemoth on this side of the Atlantic, or should I say the Pacific…
There’s more – Bebo, Fropper, and whatnot – which is a good indication that the whole world is turning into a bunch of babbling idiots (nice link, check it out).
Anyway, I zeroed down on Facebook. Went in to register, and found that there was no network for DPS Vasant Kunj! Well, I started my campaign with them to add a network, and weeks and loads of emails later, it’s there. So go ahead folks, check it out. Try entering ‘Delhi Public School, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi’ and get started…
Doesn’t social networking get annoying after a while? I mean you get friend requests for people like tila tequila who just are like a big shark trying to gobble up friend lists. Come on being besieged by annoying requests, anonymous abuses, hence it isn’t cool after a while neither is it social; I find gtalk a much better way to stay in touch.
Is it just me or I am just crazy?
Sent you a mash invite. Just to tell you it’s not amazing.
@Lord Vader: Uh, on the contrary, I feel that Yahoo! Mash is more like a structured Facebook. Not many people there though yet, as it’s in beta…
@Anuj: Gtalk, yeah, but I really don’t like to show off my online status and be bombarded for immediate replies by too many creeps. And Gtalk doesn’t even have a stealth mode, like Yahoo! Messenger. Social networking on Orkut sucks, but I don’t think that might be the case with Facebook due to more flexible privacy controls. Of course, I’m not the type who spend hours on such sites.
@Anuj: AND they’re a good way of staying in touch with school friends, when you leave school…you know, it DOES give the freedom to send messages which can be replied at their ease and doesn’t have the formal touch of an email…
You can block people if they get too bugging but the thing about social networking is, I repeat, there’s no privacy, if you do set your profile as hidden or not available to non friends, then you are treated as some retard from planet zorg. What the heck is wrong with this world?
However, find me one perfect app. and I would love to stand corrected.
You could leave offline IM messages, by the way…
@Anuj: “…if you do set your profile as hidden or not available to non friends, then you are treated as some retard from planet zorg…” True pal, very true. But with hundreds of people on my IM contact lists, it becomes a TAD difficult when I appear online and then some 25 IM windows start flashing, and then everyone starts buzzing too, just to make a point. Not that it matters (the buzzing) when you’re using Pidgin (www.pidgin.im), but it still does irritate. Perfect apps, uhm, I hate apps anyway. Too much clutter.
Hmmm, how about creating an alt. private email Id given out to only your closest friends? That way there shall be no more windows.
@Anuj: Tried that too. :) Just that the list of my ‘special friends’ keep spiralling out of control. I hate allocating some people as special anyway…