Breaking out in hyves

By Hans Nowak · January 14, 2008 at 9:51 pm · Tags:

With friends like these: Interesting article, or rather a rant, about FaceBook and similar sites. (via)

I dislike sites like FaceBook too, and especially MySpace, but largely for personal reasons. <rant> Somebody I know likes to abuse these sites to spread lies about her homelife and pretty much anything else. This behavior actually seems to be fairly common, probably because said sites tend to be infested with teenagers. They’re not really my favorite demographic, mostly because many of them profile themselves as cam whores, attention seekers, and/or emo kids. 1) Unsurprisingly, this is closely related to the stupidity level of these sites… full of “surveys”, polls, gossip, and valuable info about who is going out with whom. Also, MySpace encourages butt-ugly designs, and annoying stuff like music embedded in web pages. 2) </rant>

OK, so I wanted to vent a little bit. :-) And yeah, I’m aware that bloggers could be considered attention whores too. ^_^'

However, I actually don’t have much of a problem with the other issues mentioned in the article. (Although I skipped over the capitalist stuff.) I am also not surprised that these sites exist. “What was wrong with the pub?” the author asks. Well, not everyone is an extrovert who likes to be around people all the time. Before teenagers took over the internet, talking to people online was actually a great way to find new friends. (Or wives… ;-) Plus, you get to meet people that you would never have talked to otherwise (e.g. because they’re shy or live far away).

And yeah, the internet in general makes it easy to have many superficial friendships. But it’s not like that wasn’t possible before. (In fact, the anonymous person mentioned before thrives on such contacts.) Some of my best friends I have never met in person (or at least, not yet). My experiences may not be typical, but the possibility of lasting friendship is very real.

1) I say that, and yet my best friend happens to be a teenager… :-)

2) At least FaceBook, and hyves.nl (a Dutch MySpace clone) are bit cleaner looking.

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