Not me, and may be not some of you who read this.. but some people are really crazy about Social networking .. I always had a friction towards doing that thing that everybody seems to be doing... and so landed up experiencing orkut or facebook quite late .. actually quite forcefully because of my wife's insistence that as husband and wife we spoke to each other on orkut or facebook.. (what!!) (blink) (blink)
I always had this "why are people crazy about social networking sites" question..
and why do they enjoy logging -in to some site, typing / posting something for friends to read about, and friends doing the same to comment on it.. and then you login back sometime later and read.. and uh.. making a short conversation long..
and most often atleast two of the bunch doing this conversation would be working in the same office sitting next to each other and still prefer replying to each other on the site.
.. worse some people add a mobile phone, or,
get a notification when somebody replies, or,
a suite of more instruments and blocks
to keep track of what everybody is saying.
Why are people so crazy about social networking sites ??
The answer:
I think the web or internet was simply only invented ... for Social Networking sites.
Every bit and piece of how internet works and what it allows people to do.. seem to fill in gaps that were there in a group of people wanting to communicate but not being able to for various reasons..
All technologies of the web or internet, together, allow people to setup a system to do one thing good.. social networking.
Lets get some story here:
You had 4 friends at class 3, and 20 friends at high school, many at college, random numbers of collegues at work as you went around different companies.. and you would want to keep in touch with all those contacts.
If you took the phone, or the email, or a chat, or any conference system.. there are gaps.. which social networking sites fix.
you write a note / scrap on your page .. sometime someday.
you are not in a hurry.. and it is not some very important stuff.
your contacts read it some other time / some other day and reply to it or respond to it.. you have a conversation.. or to be more specific you have a time-insensitive, spread-out conversation.
and the interesting thing is.. you can have it with nothing.. no phones, no neccessity to be sitting in your house to receive the letter.. and somewhat importantly you dont need to pay a bill for doing this conversation.
you just do it on the internet through a browser.. which is almost available anywhere these days.
As a person in software, with good amount of specialization in internet technologies, I have known one thing: All the technology that is invented or improved around the Internet, have only one design goal.. to be able to collaborate with different other technologies in an open manner.. that in english is 'to communicate'
Facebook, MySpace, Orkut.. by design .. should only be more and more improved or get filled with advancements to make us all have..better time insensitive, spread-out conversations, but still conversations which well recorded and organized.
Web/internet technology geek, just drool for developing such sites where people collaborate.. there are thousands of such internet sites though only facebook, orkut and myspace are popular.. some others that are popular with the formal conversation club are 'scribd', 'wiki and its many flavors like pbwiki tkwiki', blogs, ...
... writing that list reminds me of bb's or bulletin boards which was one of the first web-based networking system alongwith email-based mailing lists and forums.
