Over Involvement in Networking

I have been horribly misinformed about the nature of all these social networking sites. Everyone has always said that MySpace is the gross one, Friendster is the old one no one uses anymore, and Facebook is the cool, sensible one.

I'll give you those first two points. Most people take their MySpace page as a chance to unleash the unholy spawn of garish html and every ugly .gif file they've ever seen, cross it with automatically playing background music and stupid polls along the lines of "what type of Carebear would you mostly likely marry if required", and then shake it until you can't read any of the information displayed. It's like the whole place is run by 14 year-olds with ADHD and Aspergers. Which is probably closer to the truth than I'm comfortable with.

And the number of people I know who use Friendster can not only can be counted on one hand, if I somehow managed to lose three fingers from that hand in some sort of cooking or fireworks related mishap, I could still do it.

But Jesus people, Facebook is one of the creepiest things I've ever seen. Now, granted, I just joined up with this place yesterday - I already felt bad enough about not updating a blog and a MySpace page, I didn't need the additional guilt of a third page that I ignore. But on cursory examination, is there any purpose to this place beyond stalking everyone you already know?

I think it's mostly just that little running tally of every single movement of every one your friends that is throwing me off. Why on Earth am I informed of every change in mood, every change of picture, and friending of everyone I know? Not only am I suddenly stalking all these people, I'm doing it without even meaning to. And if you actually wanted to stalk someone? Sweet lord, it's a round-the-clock Internet stakeout that takes absolutely no effort at all.

Plus, everybody can see everything I'm doing! This isn't good for my paranoia.

There are some nice things - the picture sharing is amazing, and the resultant image tagging is a very nice use of meta-level data that I think is the next logical front of the Internet. The lack of excessive customization gets rid of the horribly juvenile feel of the MySpace. And the grouping and tracking system is well done, if a little hard to navigate.

But seriously, I can't get over the stalking bit. Maybe it's just something that you get used to over time. Everyone else eased their way into the pool, whilst I just dove in headfirst hours after everyone else.

For now, though? Cree-py.