[drewprops]

I'm sorry guys, I can't pretend to go along with this crap any longer.
Social Networking sucks ass.
Or balls.
Or dung, or whatever it is that represents BADness.

I loathed MySpace the first time somebody sent me to their page... I mean, why do I want to tempt having an epileptic seizure (or even the simulation of one since I'm not epileptic)?

Then there was that new form of electric torture that I was dumb enough to join into: Facebook. Now I get all sorts of invitations, all day long, to do things that I would never waste my time on in real life. Logging in I see that I have a "Lil Green Patch" request, an opportunity to play "What's That Car Logo?", and a jillion other time-wasters that want me to add 'apps' so that somebody, somewhere can add my info to their database monster.

Oh, oh!!! And LinkedIn??
I just started adding friends to that fucker for spite... how dare other people have more professional contacts than me??? I mean, I could turn all of those contacts into a.... well I could..... you know, I must not be properly motivated, dream-wise. Otherwise I might know what to do with this wealth of professional contactery..... so for now? Garbage!!!!!

Don't even try to sell me on Twitter, you jackasses.
Somebody on my LiveJournal (bah!!!) hooked their Twitter in and suddenly we're seeing them eating peanut butter sandwiches and wiping their ass and commenting on the stuck button on their cellphone and oh GOD I want to throttle the asswipes who thought up THAT idea.

So then today I see that Pownce has gone public and I go over there with a thought of joining... after all, it's "free!!!" and.... then I remembered all of what I just wrote and then...


Then I wondered if was the only person who feels this way.

And then I began to wonder if I knew enough coders to tackle a social networking site for people who loathe social networking.


::sigh::



.

[Yonzie]

Yes you are!!!!!1!!11oneoneone

Seriously, I don't get MySpace. I have a hard time finding a page that's readable, 99% of comments and friends are spam, and my Mini slowed to a crawl trying to animate 25 GIFs simultaneously with playing music and doing a few flash ads.

Initially, I was impressed with Facebook. It looks 100 billion times better than myspace. Then I added a few friends, one of which had a profile page that is something like 10 screens long (on my 1920x1200 screen)... I've found a lot of old friends and classmates there though, which I think is pretty cool.

Twitter... Gah. Haven't tried it, not going to. Kind of what you said, except if I start using it, I'll get sucked in and do nothing but write crap and comment on other people's crap all day long. I have a hard enough time getting stuff done as it is.

[Brad]

Well, duh. Tell me something I didn't already know.

</vapid me2 comment omg kehehe! (^.^;;)>

[Mac+]

I've held out long enough on joining the mobile phone brigade and my new job dictates that I have one. So, that hold out was somewhat futile.

I'm determined not to succumb to the social network sites though.

Interesting aside though for an oldish-timer such as myself:
Jeff Veen gave a presentation at a conference I went to recently and mentioned a teenager who replied, when asked about email, "Oh yeah, I get them when my grandparents send me stuff." Apparently, this current generation is all about communicating via social network sites and SMS, etc.

How quickly I became my parents.

[dmegatool]

What's myspace ?

No seriously I never used this kind of site... it sucks. I don't even need to try them to know it. I've probably been on a myspace page like 3 or 4 times and I always thought that they were terrible.

[MCQ]

Yup.

[Mugge]

Wow. I'm not the only one who thinks Facebook is annoying?! Especially now with all it's applications, activism and stuff. Well that's already been said, so now I'll just add my own little brown nugget or two:

I have a couple of friends. They aren't particularly smart, especially not when it comes to computers. Yet they keep joining various social networks, such as WAYN or what the f*** they might call themselves. It seems that every time they join a new network they happily surrender their address book so I can have the privilege of getting spammed. Not just once, but several times and then my "friends" will also send a manual invite to me or ask me to log on and have a look at their utterly irrelevant lives.

The worst part of this wholesome mess is that even though I send this shit straight to the spam folder, there's still some bots out there who knows who my "friends" are, where we went to school together and all such stuff. They probably got more shit on us than NSA and their likes could ever hope for. Unless they were clever enough to apply some pressure to Mr. Zuckerberg. Russian hackers are probably already swarming around Facebook's servers like flies around dead rotting pig.

It's a SDMOMD (Stupidity Driven Massively On-line Mental Disorder)

[Luca]

I especially hate Facebook ever since Super Wall came out. It claims to be a "better" version of the standard Wall (which is where people just post public messages to each other).

Now, Wall posts should be the bread and butter of Facebook. It's social networking, right? Posting public messages to each other is the very definition of social networking.

Then some idiot came up with Super Wall, which lets you send messages en masse, to everyone on your friends list, thus entirely removing the "social" aspect of it. Why would you do that? All people ever do is send spam to each other now.

Same goes for all the applications. I've deleted all of mine and I encourage others to do the same.

Oh, and groups. Not a day goes by that I don't get an invitation to some dumb group like "lets get a million people so blah blah blah can happen." I left all my groups as well!

[BuonRotto]

So-called social networking has run the gamut with me. I tried it. I got a bit into it. I lost interest. Real friends and real work fill my time. I can't bother to keep up.

[kieran]

I signed up for Facebook back in '04 when I started college. It was a lot of fun for a while, reconnecting with people I hadn't seen in a while.

Now, with all of the applications and shit, it sucks. I keep getting stupid requests for shit and people just keep adding to their pages with all different stuff.

I liked FB because of how clean it looked compared to MySpace.

Now, it's getting hard to tell the difference. If Facebook allows HTML, I'm gone.

[faust]

I like linkedin, helps me get in touch with pals from the first dot com bubble and track my pals as they move around these days.

I'm in NYC and in media, changing jobs over and over is the norm here.

No use for the other sites.

[Koodari]

I have a Facebook account and a LinkedIn account. I haven't had any problem with LinkedIn yet, I think it looks like it's doing what it's meant to do.

Facebook, though? I made an account out of general interest, with my own name. Then, a couple of people popped up that I haven't seen in nearly ten years. Everyone's spamming those retarded app things "Get a car to drive around Facebook!" "Be a vampire and bite your friends!". With the quality of the tools FB offers to manage the visibility of your personal info, and how they can go evil in about a microsecond when they feel they'll get enough money out of it, I don't feel like putting any personal information on there, and I know too well that even "harmless" chitchat can and will be mined at some point in the future. I have only logged in for a couple of times in months of having the account. I'd just kill the account (or throw away the password, whatever) but I feel a little guilty about turning my back on these folks that somehow found me and took the trouble to link.

Suffice to say: would not make an account again.

[drewprops]

unsubscribe

[scratt]

What's depressing is when someone you genuinely like contacts you with a Facebook invite, or worse...

Obviously you don't sign up.. (Sorry Koodari )

But then you have to wrestle with writing an email to them to explain why you don't sign up to these things, and I am sure it's great.. bla bla bla.. But it's not your thing... Keep in touch... etc. :Puke Smiley:

[Yontsey]

I have a Facebook account that I got back in like....2004 maybe when there was no one on there. I must agree with everyone, now all those apps and invites for stupid shit is annoying.

As far as Myspace goes, I dont so much care for it, but it's very important to what I do. I have 4 Myspace accounts but 3 of them are either related to one of my two bands or my tshirt dilly. I also have a personal one.

For Myspace, it's actually quite easy to keep the spam out if you take the 30 seconds and check off some of the spam and privacy features. On my one band account, I have over 10,000 friends and use to get spam all the time, but I very rarely even get it now.

As far as LinkedIn and Twitter or whatever, I've never heard of those sites.

I am a memeber on Makeoutclub.com though. That's a kool site.

[Banana]

20 years down the road, people will be asking the presidential candidates if they have a social networking page.

You heard it first here.

[Bryson]

You know what would make FaceBook 100% better? Stealth deleting of "friends" that you don't really like.

[PB PM]

What would make Facebook better would be to stealth shut down all their servers.

[faust]

Originally Posted by Yontsey I have a Facebook account that I got back in like....2004 maybe when there was no one on there. I must agree with everyone, now all those apps and invites for stupid shit is annoying. As far as Myspace goes, I dont so much care for it, but it's very important to what I do. I have 4 Myspace accounts but 3 of them are either related to one of my two bands or my tshirt dilly. I also have a personal one. For Myspace, it's actually quite easy to keep the spam out if you take the 30 seconds and check off some of the spam and privacy features. On my one band account, I have over 10,000 friends and use to get spam all the time, but I very rarely even get it now. As far as LinkedIn and Twitter or whatever, I've never heard of those sites. I am a memeber on Makeoutclub.com though. That's a kool site.

LinkedIn started off as a networking site for working professionals but now recruiters have pretty much ruined it.

[kieran]

Originally Posted by Bryson You know what would make FaceBook 100% better? Stealth deleting of "friends" that you don't really like.

You can do this now.

When you remove a friend, they don't get a notification or anything. I've done it to a few people (and I'm sure a few have done to me)

[Chellovek]

Shouldn't this be a poll?

Does social networking suck
(a) Ass.
(b) Balls.
(c) Dung.

oh and I guess we would also need

(d) It has been <15 minutes since my last facebook entry.
(e) Beer.

[drewprops]

Oh I just Twittered that!!!!11111


.

[Banana]

Originally Posted by PB PM What would make Facebook better would be to stealth shut down all their servers.

They'd simply restart it back up.

Better to write a virus that specifically targets the networking sites server and have it zero all the hard drives *then* crash the head.

(I know that this is impossible to accomplish in software, but damn think of the publicity!)

[nikstar101]

I don't mind FaceBook as long as people use it sensibly, not having huge amounts of crap all over the page. I is good for organising event though, i will give it that. But i only add friends who i actually know and will meet. One of my friends has 400+ facebook friends half (or more) of which she has never seen.

And i hate myspace with a passion. I like the idea but the implementation is awful.

[Banana]

Does anyone remember Ringo? I understand that was pre-MySpace but was taken down after an incident involving child predatory or something like that.

Unfortunately, creepy guys use Facebook to stalk college women. Says so on my campus paper.

[digitaldave]

I just can't see the point of social networking sites. I have a Facebook account, as do a few of my friends, but I can't see why I would use it to keep in touch - if I want to contact a load of my friends, I'll send them an email. Maybe I'm just getting old and missing the point of the whole social networking thing .

[Wrao]

My thought on social networking have oscillated greatly over the years. I have gone from using myspace more than I was breathing, to not having any social networking accounts for over a year, to slowly inching my way back onto the facebook, and now I am presently, with facebook account, and not entirely annoyed with it.

That being said, the fine line of value and worthlessness is there, and the amount of 'are you a turtle or a lump of clay?" type quizzes that are sent to me daily, definitely don't do much for me. But, I *have* earnestly, and productively buttressed a few distant relationships, friendships, and acquaintances. I have successfully networked with a few people for business reasons, and I have played copious amounts of online scrabble.

Really, I think of facebook as just a fancier version of conventional email. The profile, quiz taking, survey, information swapping, gossip sharing is cute and all, but the only lasting function the site really has is the email system that really does work pretty damn well. It offers some features gmail doesn't have(such as conference emails where people can join and leave an email 'thread') and it makes some features more streamlined(attaching pictures/movies). As an email system, it is really not that bad, and given the fact that all my friends have essentially replaced their gmail with facebook, I have little choice but to use it if I mean to stay in touch. Combine that with the occasional laughs the status updates and 'wall' can provide, and I'm not so against it all these days.

Still though, there are a few people that I still use conventional email with, and for whatever reason, emails from them, in conventional email, seem to be worth a lot more.


sidenote: another interesting facet of facebook is that they are becoming very active in the 2008 election, with extensive polling, surveys and debates posted for the unwashed masses to participate in. Of course they are in no means scientific or absolute, the sampling base is enormous. I saw one poll have over 300,000 respondents. Which, is kind of neat.

[apple007]

Not much to add, but I've never been big on these sites. They've always been annoying, there's too many of them to keep track or to be genuinely useful -- Become my friend at Facebook! Join my network at LinkedIn! Update your contact info. at Ringo! Add me as a friend at MySpace! etc., etc. -- and I just plain don't have the time to update these sites every time I sneeze.

I've actually never had a Facebook or MySpace page/account. I guess that puts me in a rather small demographic, especially for someone under 40.

[wecallitfall]

I happen to be quite a SN junkie

MySpace - check (make that check x 3 accounts!)
FaceBook - check
last.fm - check
flickr - check
digg - check (does digg count? meh!)
twitter - check (although i have no *actual* friends on there)

Infact digg, flickr, last.fm and facebook are probably the 4 sites i visit the most

Guilty as charged your honor

[Windswept]

Originally Posted by Banana 20 years down the road, people will be asking the presidential candidates if they have a social networking page. You heard it first here.

Sorry, but they've already 'been' asking. And, apparently, some of the presidential candidates 'do' indeed have accounts with social networking sites. I can't remember which candidates though.

Originally Posted by Wrao But, I *have* earnestly, and productively buttressed a few distant relationships, friendships, and acquaintances. I have successfully networked with a few people for business reasons, and I have played copious amounts of online scrabble. Really, I think of facebook as just a fancier version of conventional email. The profile, quiz taking, survey, information swapping, gossip sharing is cute and all, but the only lasting function the site really has is the email system that really does work pretty damn well. It offers some features gmail doesn't have(such as conference emails where people can join and leave an email 'thread') and it makes some features more streamlined(attaching pictures/movies).

Interesting. I can see where having an 'email thread' could be extremely handy for a *lot* of different purposes. Perfect for organizing and coordinating several people from different households who are going on a trip together, for example.

sidenote: another interesting facet of facebook is that they are becoming very active in the 2008 election, with extensive polling, surveys and debates posted for the unwashed masses to participate in. Of course they are in no means scientific or absolute, the sampling base is enormous. I saw one poll have over 300,000 respondents. Which, is kind of neat.

One of the presidential-candidate debates a few weeks ago had some kind of a tie-in with Facebook. (I think it was a CNN-sponsored debate.) I believe CNN even interviewed a few people from Facebook. IIRC, they did come across as members of the 'unwashed masses', but I can't remember specifics well enough to comment.