I am not an avid user of social networks, although i have accounts on many different networks… I want to talk about a few different networks, their rise and fall, and why they succeeded or failed…
First up, MySpace…
When i was younger, circa 2005-2006, I was interested in making electronic music and learning to play an instrument or two… Well, i learned to play on a keyboard, only with my left hand though, because the right hand was always on a mouse tweaking different parameters live as the other hand was playing notes… I was never interested in engaging in long contact over the net because to me there is no substitute for face to face communication and eye contact…call me old fashioned…
An interesting exception is video chatting/conferencing… it creates an illusion of a face to face communication and intermittent eye contact, but at least you are not talking to the “disconnected human being represented by a cropped head-shot picture and converse through input boxes and simulate emotions using EmotionIcons…”
So, back to MySpace… As i said before, i was interested in music production and so i registered on MySpace to get some ideas as to what other people thought about my music and such… I had a pretty good run and then reached a point when i needed to dedicate much more time and financial resources in order to take my production skills to the next level… That was the year i started attending Baruch and school responsibilities required me to put my “music career” on hold… Obviously i stopped using MySpace as often and many of my friends, real people i actually know and hang-out with regularly, started to switch to Facebook…
Facebook…
Well, i didnt like Facebook from the beginning because it was a much less flexible platform than MySpace and had an overly minimal design… But because most of my friends switched completely to FB, i had no choice but to follow… As FB evolved and more and more of my friends from abroad started to transfer to FB from their regional/local social networks (vkontakte.ru – Russian social network; one.lv – Latvian social network) it became apparent to me that i could have all my friends in the same place and check up on what they are up-to in a very convenient way (Wall, notifications, etc)… At first it was good, then came along dirty applications… Social applications on FB are overly annoying… All of them want to use your information for some marketing purpose and unless you agree to their terms you cant even access some of the reviews that your friends have completed about you… Freaking fascism…
Another annoying feature of FB is that if someone is a friend then you can either grant them complete access to all of your stuff or you basically restrict access… Horrible when you have lots of ex-GF’s who you are in good relations with but dont really want them snooping around your posts and seeing post from your other ex-GF’s and such… So privacy controls are crappy…among many other things… Thats where Google+ comes into play…
Google+
Google+ is a pretty good platform, as long as you use it properly… It is very good at separating people into categories (circles) and controlling what each type of circle is used for and has access too… The reason it is not as popular as FB is precisely because it is a more closed and private Social Network than FB… Many FB users dont like Google+ because they dont know how to use it, and because they like spying on their friends and ex’s… So FB is a network for stalkers or people who have no life… Thats my opinion…
Google+ is very useful for collaborative purposes as it integrates with Google Docs and other Google services… It is a place where meaningful conversations occur, whereas FB is a place for chatter and nonsense…people just killing time or whatever else their excuse is to sit on that network day and night…
My personal take on popular platforms which offer multimedia chat
- Skype – my favorite by far… Awesome functionality, and a fairly stable platform… Actually after Microsoft bought the company for a couple $ billion, the quality of service has been a bit more sporadic and sometimes weird errors occur that make no sense… just a by-product of Microsoft (the hand of death in tech world… 🙂
- Google Talk – a bit laggy and lacks many advanced features that Skype has had for many years…
- ooVoo – Horrible but has potential, in my point of view… But then again i used the free version, maybe the paid version is better…but i will stick to Skype for now…
- Messengers (Yahoo, MSN, AOL) – Garbage, out-dated crap that should have rolled over and died… MSN is very buggy and is full of weirdos and con artists from Middle East, Africa, and Asia… Obviously full of spam and other web-crap-ware…
Dont use it and dont see much point to using it… If i want to tell someone or a group of people something, i prefer email…
An interesting idea that will have issues realizing its goals, for now… They have a fundamental issue with their coding and what it allows them to do… It is build on RoR (RubyOnRails) which is a framework for rapid developing of web applications. It has certain issues in terms of how extendable it is… I think they will figure out the kinks eventually…when that happens, it has the potential to truly revolutionize the landscape of professional people and business interactions…