wickedqueen.net

Giuliani’s daughter caught in Obama campaign Facebook group:

On his daughter Caroline’s Facebook profile, the self-described liberal was a part of a group that supports Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential bid. After Slate.com emailed her about her about it, she immediately left the group, the web site reported.

People. For the last time. Facebook is not secure, okay? Even if you have your profile totally locked down (this would include blocking, say, the faculty at your institution, particularly if you plan to lie about funeral attendance to get out of class*), a public group will still show your membership, and only one person has to see you in that group and tell Slate, and then CNN picks it up, and then you are IN THE NEWS. Particularly if you are Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, and thus already of some baseline interest to the media. Although frankly, if you are Giuliani’s daughter by Donna Hanover, I’m not sure why you’d be making any effort not to embarrass him.

And apparently she didn’t even have her profile locked, although Slate.com reports that she “uses a slight variation of her name on the Facebook site.” Several Slate comments assert that this is no excuse:

She is a kid, not a public figure, regardless of the technical legal status of the information posted on Facebook. That may matter to your lawyers but not to ordinary people. Do you not care about her as a human being at all? Is there no common decency left anywhere?

…

Yes, you as one of the 42,000 people affiliated with Harvard or Trinity were able to see it, but that doesn’t mean that you had permission to publish it for the general public’s viewing on Slate. While I don’t support Giuliani, I don’t think that it’s fair to invade his daughter’s online privacy either.

Look, there is decency and then there is verging-on-idiocy. How many stories have to be broken through Facebook before users figure out that it is NOT PRIVATE? Personally, I prefer to believe that Caroline Giuliani did it on purpose and then left the group out of some kind of misplaced after-the-fact guilt, because that is nicer than thinking that even the most recent wave of Facebook users, freaking 17-year-olds who probably can’t remember life before the internets, cannot figure out that if you post something “private,” “secret,” or “illegal” on Facebook, SOMEONE WILL FIND OUT.

Facebook! Is not! Private! And you are not doing anybody any favors by pretending that it is, because as this story demonstrates, there are too many people who are not going to go along with your magical fantasy world. Would you teach your children that everyone always uses their damn turn signals?

And then there was that story that CNN presented as unmitigatedly heartwarming, although I thought it was a little weird and obviously an extreme outlier: Mom reunites through Facebook with son she gave up for adoption

—

*True story.

Someone has developed a ‘Top Eight’ plug-in for Facebook.

As most Facebook users know, recently Facebook started allowing third-party applications that you can embed in your profile. Unlike MySpace, they still exert a lot of control over profile appearance; you still can’t put in background images or blinking text, which I think we can agree is for the best. However, the “Top Eight” is ganked directly from one of the bare bones defaults of a MySpace profile: the display of your eight “best” friends’ names and profile icons.

I’m not sure if the new Facebook plug-in uses a static order the way MySpace does; I’m a little reluctant to install it, although my reaction is not as negative as some:

stop trying to make it like it - if you wanna depress people by saying who your “best friends” are then go to myspace.com

As reported elsewhere, this smacks more of favouritism than convenience, and as such, I disapprove of it, also, but at least we do have the option of whether or not we use it, unlike with MySpace.

definately. myspace is ok, but facebook is more for school people than every single person in the world… leave the top friend drama at myspace

This is not myspace. I won’t be friends with anyone who uses this tool…

Wow, facebook is really turning into Myspace. I remember when facebook was for college students only. I miss those days.

ahh this is so lame!! i can’t believe this obvious copy of myspace!
and to the people who said don’t add it and it won’t be a problem — you still have to deal with your friends who get it. how would you feel if you have to find out through facebook that you aren’t one of their “BFF”s ?

Why am I not surprised that most of the people who like this application are high school punks?

exactly..thats why facebook isnt for middle school, theres no need for the extra drama.

Young son, when i was in high school, Facebook was for people who got into real colleges. Yeah this app bothers me too and yeah I’m not gonna use it. I don’t wanna leave facebook cuz there is nothing else like facebook the way it was about a year or so ago (man it was perfect then). Next people will be able to change their profile colors and make them annoying pink and purple [editor’s note: this is an interesting foray into implicit misogyny–makes a nice break from the classism, anyway], then there will be wallpapers, then youll be able to change the font, then music will play automatically when you go to someone’s profile, then there wll be all kinds of moving crap in the background. The changeable layout and these little apps like top friends are just the start of it. They keep trying to make things better when in reality “less is more.” Facebook was better like a year ago and I wish there was a way to keep it from slowly drifiting toward myspace. Reply and fire back if you want, I don’t care.

To all the high schoolers who tell us to just “not use this app”, go back to Myspace. College students never truly wanted high schoolers or anyone else for that matter, aside from college students, on this website and now look what’s happened.
All of these apps are being developed with Myspace-ready high-schooler friendly mindsets. Apps like THIS do NOT belong on Facebook. Just like adding music that plays automatically to your profile doesn’t. Just like changing your profile away from the basic blues and simple style doesn’t.
It’s all a matter of time before the high schoolers/outsiders demands get too heavy and Facebook begins pandering to you dimwits.

The discourse has a lot of references to the general superiority of Facebook over MySpace, and specifically to the idea that opening Facebook to non-(college) students made it more like MySpace and therefore not as good. This is really just a continuation of the discourse that sprang up immediately before and after Facebook opened membership to the public–just now people can point at specific things they dislike and say the riffraff caused it. There are plenty of people making the counterargument “if you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it,” so don’t take the comments cited above as indicative of a unified stance on Facebook (yeah, it is to laugh).

I can certainly understand objections to MySpace-ification, but it’s interesting to me that people so immediately blame the presence of non-university students, as if they’d never met anyone they disliked or considered stupid in college. Don’t any of these kids have to take College Writing with a bunch of idiots? Also, the perception of MySpace as dominated by high school students is not entirely accurate–certainly not if you think they’re the driving force behind the mp3s that play automatically on profile pages. I’d say the indie musicians who use the site for distribution are much more invested in that particular feature. The internet and pseudo-intellectual elitism: two great tastes that continue to taste great together, I guess.

Actually, looking at that throw-away reference to pink and purple profiles, I’m now wondering if MySpace suffers from negatively valenced feminization in the same way that LiveJournal does; the site is often perceived by internet users as a young, female ghetto, despite the fact that there are significant enclaves of older and male users, and who you see there really depends on your particular social network and how you manage it. Just not the kind of people you want to be associated with–stick with Blogspot.

Interesting.

I am sitting in the lobby area of the Z Center athletic facility, conducting interviews about Facebook use via instant messenger before my workout. It occurred to me this morning, as I was trying to figure out the logistics of all the interviews I had scheduled and my desire to go to the gym, that I didn’t actually have to go in to the office as I’d been planning–the wireless is just as good at the Z Center and either way I’d be on my laptop.

And this way I shave off about 20 minutes of walking around campus, which is kind of important because I have like six interviews scheduled today. I’ll do two interviews here at the gym, work out, mail birthday presents at the campus post office, and bus it home so that I can be there by 3:15 for my next round of interviews (I have to be back at home for them because one of them is a phone interview that I’ll be recording with Skype, and it doesn’t run well on my laptop, plus my headset is at home, plus I realized this morning while getting dressed that I need to do some laundry because I am currently wearing my second-to-last set of gym clothes).

And THEN, I just got a message from City of Heroes that Issue 9 has gone live, which means that there is some serious new content up. I just made level 45 on Monday night, so I’m excited to try out my newly beefed up ice armor,* but I also want to see how the new invention system works. I never bothered to look at it on the test server, so it’ll all be new to me. I just hope nothing is severely broken.

Also, thanks to craigslist, it looks like I’m set up for housing in California. This is a relief, although of course I haven’t even BEGUN packing. I’m having a party next week to give away stuff that I don’t want to move, and have decided that I am getting rid of my bedspread because I hate it. This is a recurring problem for me. Some of you may recall that my current bedspread was the object of a long and arduous search for a reversible pink and green comforter. Which it is, but you know, they’re kind of UGLY pink and green. Not the shades I had envisioned, and over time, they have become more and more objectionable in my eyes, especially since my friend Matt bragged to me about the awesome zebra print bedspread he found for super cheap in Australia.** And of course moving pretty much makes ALL your possessions less attractive.

Probably I should stop buying bedspreads online. The future is great, but given that I keep hating bedspreads that looked pretty good on Amazon Marketplace, it might be best to return to my old-fashioned shopping roots for the next one.

—

*For the two or three readers who might possibly care: when I hit 41, I initially took Electricity Mastery as my epic power pool, since Andromeda Sparks is an electric/electric blaster. Unfortunately, it really sucked, so I respec’d to Cold Mastery instead. So far I’ve got an area of effect sleep power and this ice armor, which is pretty cool–it takes both defense AND damage resistance enhancements, and I’ve now got two of each on it, so I expect noticeably improved performance.

+This is not slighting Travis, because Travis has video blogged.

Report: Text messaging harms written language

The report laments that, in many cases, candidates seemed “unduly reliant on short sentences, simple tenses and a limited vocabulary”.

The issue with texting is that a) people need to learn faster thumb typing skills (but probably Irish 15-year-olds are pretty good already) or b) we all need to start texting in Chinese characters, which allow much denser meaning to be communicated within the same character limit. I’d like to argue that people can tell the difference between the context of texting and the context of formal writing, but I can still remember writing a group paper a few years ago with an undergraduate who repeatedly referred, in an academic paper, to college student research participants as “kids.” So maybe it’s not such a stretch to argue that if texting is the main form of writing in which a young person engages, it will shape their writing style in other contexts when they are asked to write.

Solution: encourage Irish youth to write Harry Potter slashfic. They can learn all about good writing, peer editing, AND realistic sexual physics. Problem solved!*

Also, thanks to das_hydra for the link to this one: Family Wins Right To Access Dead Son’s Web Page

Facebook changed a dead 22-year-old’s password, even though his family had it and had been using the page as a memorial, and threatened to delete the account because the original account holder had died. This article really presents it not so much as a privacy issue as a general rejection of “Fakester” (or I guess in this context, “Fakebook”?) accounts of the kind that Friendster famously monitored for and deleted whenever they found them–and subsequently led to their virtually hemorrhaging users directly into MySpace.

Some of you may remember a year or two ago there was a big issue about the rights to a Yahoo email account belonging to a U.S. soldier who was killed in Iraq; in that case, however, it seems like you could make an argument about the privacy of the dead account holder, who might not have wanted his parents to have access to his email even (or especially) in the event of his death. The parents of the dead Facebook user, by whatever means,** already had his password, so it wasn’t a question of the site’s liability for protecting privacy concerns. I’m glad they won.

If they hadn’t had the password, though, it seems unlikely that legal precedent would support a request to obtain it. It makes me think about my own online presence and what kind of provisions I should make for access–morbid, yes, but at this stage of life, my blogs might be my most valuable assets, long-term.

—

*I was recently remarking to a friend lamenting the number of teenagers who show up in online Straight Edge communities asking for permission to have sex that you could really fill a gap in the market with a website the purpose of which was SOLELY to give teenagers permission to have sex (in concordance with local statutes, of course). For some reason, my friend didn’t think that the sneakers companies would be excited about advertising on such a site. Don’t they want their target market to associate their product with the warm glow of permission to have sex? Why should Dan Savage have the monopoly?

**I was told that his friends gave it to them, so it was obviously not totally closely guarded. I don’t know what the legal precedent on that would be, especially for someone who is dead and has made no direct provision concerning who should be granted access to the account. But it seems at least like the site wouldn’t be liable.

(I’m back-dating because it IS a Valentine’s Day post, and I have other ideas for today anyway.)

So somebody lost Facebook a LOT of money this Valentine’s Day.

The Facebook gift shop has apparently been manifest in some form for awhile, but it was only within the past week that it was added to users’ home pages, on the right sidebar–in fact, is has now disappeared again from that location, but if you go to a person’s profile page and scroll down, you’ll find a “gift box” just above their “wall,” with the option of giving them a gift.

The “gift,” in case you don’t already know, is a brightly colored graphic, less than an inch square on my resolution anyway, designed by Susan Kare, who did the original Mac icons. They’re cute. They cost $1 each.*

They are, of course, totally noncorporeal. Some people might wonder why anyone would pay $1 for some pixels, but the issue here is the nature of gifts, which have never really been about what they are. Or they are other than they seem. Whatever.

Gifts aren’t about necessity, which is why, for instance, bath products are so popular.** Gifts are not about permanence, either–a real flower is much more transient than a digital one. Gifts are generally about reciprocity; it’s embarrassing to get a Christmas gift from someone for whom you have no reciprocal present. And gifts are about giving and getting–giving and getting as social actions, which means that in general, they’re enhanced by an audience.

The major point of flowers on Valentine’s Day is not the flowers themselves. It’s the knowledge that someone loves you and gave you flowers–a knowledge that is even better shared, that is, when all your co-workers can SEE that someone loves you and gave you flowers. What better place to put a gift than Facebook, where the audience is not limited to the recipient’s dorm or office? Where the audience, in fact, is everyone on the site whom the recipient has designated as an Other of some degree of some signifance? And where the newsfeed makes it fairly likely that they’ll see the fact of the gift?

The smartest thing that Facebook did with these gifts was give everyone one free token. One gift to give at no cost–but only one. Unlike MySpace, Facebook does not order friends. You don’t have a Top Eight (and MySpace’s top friends lists are statically ordered, so that even within the Top Eight or Twelve or whatever, you can only ever have ONE Best Friend).

But if you have one gift, and you give it, you’re making a pretty major statement about the recipient you singled out. Unless you give it to a boyfriend/girlfriend-type Significant Other, chances are there are going to be people who thought they were just as important.

The obvious strategy here would be to give NO gifts, but the lure of the free is likely to draw people into giving one that has no cost–and then they’re much more likely to buy more gifts in order to maintain the peace by not overly favoring a single relationship.

Valentine’s Day is obviously a prime occasion for all this gift-giving, and in fact the Facebook giftshop provided seven V-Day only gifts. However, for AT LEAST five hours on Valentine’s Day, the giftshop was inoperable, clearly overloaded by too much traffic.

Most people were probably giving gifts pretty impulsively. If the giftshop wasn’t there when the mood struck them, they probably didn’t keep reloading to see if it was up and running again.** Those five hours of downtime, I suspect, cost Facebook a HUGE potential profit, although they may have coincidentally driven up the social value of those limited edition gifts.

I’m not sure why they took the giftshop link off the home page after V-Day, either. It didn’t take up a lot of room–depending on how many system messages you have in that column, there’s very little in it. Maintaining a link above individual profile’s walls is a good idea, and maybe that’s how people prefer to give a gift anyway, rather than going to the gift shop and having to mentally scroll through one’s friends list to think of whose name to enter.

I’m interested to see what holidays they do this for. Will Easter rate? God, I love Easter crap.

Speaking of which, today being the day after V-Day, I have a strong instinct to search CVS for discounted V-Day stuffies. Oh, pink fluffy imaginary animals, how I love you.

—

*Actually, at least for the moment, when you buy one for a dollar you get the option of buying 4 additional gift credits for $2, so that you end up paying $3 for 5 gifts. But I don’t know if that’s a special promotion or what.

***I am a special obsessive case.

Just so you know, I wrote this entry yesterday and then managed to hit a random combination of keys that closed the tab in FireFox. It was extremely traumatic. Demoralized, I gave up and went to the gym, but now I am trying again, because I feel bad about not updating, especially when my top entry is so very, very geeky. Anyway, this is why I have backdated it.

—

Marriage loses its edge

I actually heard about these data a little while ago, but then yesterday I saw this headline on Yahoo News. The numbers are a little complicated, from what I can make out–for instance, when they say that marriage is no longer the living arrangement for a majority of households, they mean that married couple households (55.2 million of them) now make up only 49.8% of households total.

“Households” as a category seems to include “nonfamily households,” which the article asserts are primarily unmarried cohabiting couples (some of them same-sex), although I don’t know how the Census handles, say, roommates. It seems like if you share an address you’re a household, even if you write your name on all your condiments and meticulously split the electric bill. But how should I know how the Census handles roommates? Do I look like a demographer?*

Anyway, confusingly, it appears that unmarried adults living alone, also not categorized as families, are something different from “nonfamily households,” and it’s really not clear if they are counted in the total number of households of which “traditional households with married couples at their core” now constitute 49.8%. There “over 30 million” such singles, anyway, and 36.7 million nonfamily households that are mostly people living in various types of sin, unless they are just roommates,** and another 19 million single-parent households (14 million of them headed by single women). It doesn’t say how many of the “nonfamily” households involve children, although:

Douglas Besharov, a sociologist with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said it is difficult for the traditional family to emerge unscathed after three and a half decades of divorce rates reaching 50 percent and five decades out-of-wedlock births.

“Change is in the air,” Besharov said in a recent interview with the State Department journal called US Society and Values. “The only question is whether it is catastrophic or just evolutionary.”

He predicted that cohabitation and temporary relationships between people were likely to dominated America’s social landscape for years to come.

“Overall, what I see is a situation in which people — especially children — will be much more isolated, because not only will their parents both be working, but they’ll have fewer siblings, fewer cousins, fewer aunts and uncles,” the scholar argued. “So over time, we’re moving towards a much more individualistic society.”

So apparently out-of-wedlock cousins don’t count. Maybe decent children are just ashamed to spend time with them.*** Anyway, it’s hard to imagine families getting much more isolated than the suburbs have already made them. If anything, out-of-wedlock births should be promoting a connection with grandparents, or so I imagine would argue the woman from Pocahontas, Missouri who told my mother she really hoped her 17-year-old daughter would get pregnant in her senior year of high school and thus never leave.****

It is true that overall families have gotten smaller over the years, particularly in the middle and upper classes, and that does lead eventually to a reduction in the size of kin networks overall, but I don’t think divorce is the primary cause here. I’d be more inclined to look at the cost of college, maybe women’s age at first childbirth–I don’t know; do I look like a demographer?*

Of course, you’d certainly never know that marriage was in a decline by going through my mail. As a resident of the Midwest who is not (in the long term) poor, I am freaking surrounded by people getting hitched all the goddamn time. I try not to spiral into despair, with little help from Yahoo News, who follow their decline of marriage news link immediately with this one:

Buck the trend: Find your match

Actually, this raises what I think is an interesting question: are personals users more marriage-minded overall than the general population? Do they perceive greater time pressure and/or disadvantage in the market? Are they, like, super picky? Or are they just really tired of paying more than twice as great a percentage of their income towards rent, but like me, reluctant to put up with a roommate without fringe benefits?

—

*My hair would indicate a resounding “NO.”

****True story.

Social networks: Bait for cybercrime

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The majority of adults who use of social networking sites like News Corp.’s (Charts) MySpace and FaceBook engage in dangerous behavior that exposes them to cybercrime, according to a survey released Wednesday.

About 74 percent of adults who use social networking sites have given out personal information like an e-mail address, birthday or social security number, according to a survey conducted by security software firm CA (Charts) and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA).

“Giving out a social security number, paired with a birthday and name could provide enough ammunition for criminals to hack into financial records and compromise users’ personal information,” Ron Texeria, executive director of NCSA, said in a statement. (emphasis added)

Um, okay, so, excuse me for a minute here, but which of those things is not like the others?

My Facebook profile has my birthday and primary email. It sure as hell does not have my SSN. Because I am not an IDIOT. Could we maybe break down that 74% so we can see how many people actually give out personal information that marks them as IDIOTS, rather than their email addresses, which will primarily just attract spam?

Or would that interfere with our technophobic fear-mongering? …Oh, it would. Sorry.

You know, it’s true that many people don’t realize how broad an audience has access to information that they make available online, and they should probably be more aware. I have known many people who regretted blogging something, for instance. But I can’t think of any case in which the topic about which they wished, in hindsight, they had not blogged was their freaking social security number. Sexual antics, yes. Government-issued personal identification numbers, no.

Some people are just determined to be terrified of the internets. Maybe because they are the kind of people who might accidently mass email their social security numbers? Not that I want to draw any spurious conclusions here.

That would be bad journalism.

So as you may have heard, recently a lot of Facebook users got up in arms about the new Facebook newsfeed feature. To express their displeasure, many of them joined anti-newsfeed Facebook groups, and the admins actually apologized and provided opt-outs for every category of action that could possibly be provided on the feed, as well as listing categories of action that will “never be published” on it.

(Of course, it’s pretty weak to make the feature opt-out when it could just as easily be opt-in, but I don’t personally care about it, and I like having the feed on the people on my friends list.)

Now, drunk on power, many Facebook users are creating groups and petitions against the site’s planned opening to the public, i.e. people without university email accounts: “open Facebook.”

Facebook already allows high school students who have been invited by other high school student members (I don’t know how they kicked this feature off); “open Facebook,” however, would just be open to everyone. The public. Many current Facebook users are VERY upset about this.

It’s ugly, frankly. It’s mostly just elitist ranting:

“I didn’t sign up for MYSPACE!”
“I don’t want JUST ANYBODY to see my profile!”
“Facebook was SPECIAL because you had to have a UNIVERSITY account to join! They should never have let in the high schoolers!”

Although it’s not very visible in the general discourse, a few people have cited safety concerns, arguing that the current Facebook system allows for identity verification, which they believe keeps them safer. This isn’t terribly compelling, since essentially the only thing having a university email account proves is that, say, John Smith really is “John Smith.” It doesn’t provide any information about John Smith’s propensity to lie, cheat, steal, or otherwise do harm to other human beings. To argue that requiring .edu email addresses of users keeps all users safe is to buy into the implicit assumption that college students/graduates are “better people” than non-students/graduates.

The way Facebook is set up, in fact, you should already have had at least minimal contact with people you add to your friends; verification of the “John Smith really is John Smith” variety is totally useless. You can already control the networks to which the fact of your membership is even visible–if you only want people at your university to be able to tell that you even have an account, thus seeing your name and photo (but not necessarily anything else), you already have the option to maintain that level of privacy. Likewise, you have detailed control over who can view your full profile. Hell, you can add people to your friends and still restrict them to your “limited profile,” although I’m not sure exactly what that is.

I’d be interested to see how many people would shut up about making Facebook open to the public if they, say, required a major credit card for identity verification. It verifies exactly as much as having a university email account and, incidentally, is all you need to file a change of address with the USPS via their website.

I realize that people like feeling elite, regardless of the criteria for membership, and certainly I prefer Facebook to MySpace, but it’s not because it shields me from the dirty, dangerous laboring classes–it’s because the interface doesn’t make my eyes bleed. I have a MySpace account because there are people I know who have MySpace and, under the current requirements, couldn’t have a Facebook account if they wanted one. I think at least some of them would really like Facebook, but apparently many people feel that the non-college degree-holding untouchables should be condemned to MySpace whether they like it or not–they don’t want them somehow “contaminating” Facebook. Believe me, if Facebook starts suggesting that we embed mp3s in our profiles, I’ll be the first person to join the anti-noise pollution group.

But if you’re really that invested in belonging to a club that absolutely will not allow people who are not pursuing and do not hold college degrees, maybe you should use some of that 72% more annual income than high school graduates that you’re earning and set one up for pay. Or you could just join a country club. Whatever.

—

*Real Genius remains the best movie ever.

The best thing about Facebook, so far, is actually their photo system.

In addition to allowing you to sort photos into albums and minimally mess with them after uploading (rotation and such), and of course to put captions on them, Facebook has a tagging system. It doesn’t seem to allow you to create your own tags, but what it does do is pretty cool: you can tag photos as containing yourself or any other Facebook member with whom you have a direct connection. Then, when people view your profile and click on “your photos,” they get all the photos that you’ve posted AND any photos posted by other users that have been tagged with your name.

Obviously, this is geared towards orienting to photos as primarily being about the people who are in them, but it is a social networking site, after all. And of course it can lead to photos like this one being made publicly available by people who are supposed to love you. But no system is perfect.

ETA: Oh! And apparently you click on the photo to tag it because it will associate the name you input with the area of the photo you clicked, so you can put boxes around people’s faces. Coooooooool.

So I resisted getting a Facebook account for like a year, figuring that hey, I may have an LJ, but I am DEFINITELY too old for that shit.

Then my comm arts prof made fun of me–well, indirectly. But he made a pointed remark yesterday about what happens to people who fail to adopt new technologies. Naturally, I have sort of a misplaced pride in not being That Guy (although: see my unnatural devotion to MUSIC, which faded after 1999 only because my undergrad institution took it away), and I know my sister Sophie uses it pretty obsessively, so I went and made a Facebook account yesterday.

And promptly discovered that not only do multiple grad students in my department have them, but so does my FATHER. Geeze. So much for being the technological innovator in the family.

Then I went to the doctor’s office this morning to get my INR checked, and while I was in the elevator with several people, one of them turned to me and said: “Hey, aren’t you on MySpace?”

Uh, yeah. Yeah, I am. Only because of my old friend Laura, who uses it to blog. I think it has a shitty interface, so I don’t use it much. But this is the second time I’ve been in an elevator* and had someone who I thought was a stranger recognize me from the interweb–and turn out to be someone to whom I am pretty much directly virtually connected.

My comm arts prof remarked yesterday that as networking systems like Friendster and Facebook add blogs and other features, the boundaries between different kinds of internet presence are breaking down. Reflecting on that–it’s probably true–I think one reason I never found the network sites particularly interesting is that I already used LJ, which had very good features for keeping an online journal (particularly filters and commenting, for me), but was also strongly focused on networks already–that’s a major difference between LJ and, say, Blogspot.

In recent months, of course, SixApart has been actively working to make LJ even more like the network sites, adding new fields to the info page like schools attended, and adding features like the ScrapBook (which, dude, talk about a shitty interface, but I get a lot of space on it with my permanent account).

Despite all this, however, LJ remains pretty ghetto-ized in a lot of ways. I think sites like Facebook probably draw a lot more “casual users.” For one thing, they’re not inextricably linked in the minds of many internet users with bad goth poetry written by self-pierced 15-year-old girls who can’t spell. They’re also not billed as being FOR blogging/journaling, which of course a lot of people have no interest in anyway.

On the other hand, this may give LJ an edge when it comes to actually reaping benefits from the network–as long as non-users don’t pay enough attention to it to create actual harmful effects (”we can’t hire HIM, he has a LIVEJOURNAL”), being part of a smaller network might mean stronger ties to other members overall: a kind of underdog team mentality.

One thing for which I use LJ that might work better–but I’m not sure about this–on, say, Facebook, are the kind of general bulletin posts that I make to my Madison filter when I need a ride to the grocery store, or the one I made this morning to my entire friends list, asking someone who already had my phone number to please call it, because I couldn’t find my cell phone.** That kind of thing may be solely a function of how active your particular network is–if you have a lot of Facebook friends frequently checking whatever kind of public messaging system they’ve got, then this is an effective way to get someone, anyone, to call your cell phone; if you don’t have an active network, it doesn’t matter what site you’re using, you’re still just shouting into the virtual abyss.

BUT, overall number of users on any site is probably going to affect the activity level of any individual user’s personal network. So it may be that Facebook is where it’s at. We’ll see.

If you want to see my Facebook or MySpace profiles, I’ve added them to the sidebar under “the rest of me.”

And finally, on a rather different note, I’ve been meaning to post a poem I wrote a few years ago that is all about internet social networks, really: Love song for girl in chatroom #2

(It was the second love song, not the second chatroom.)

—

*Obviously it’s happened more than twice, outside of elevators. But twice in them.

**It was in my bathroom. Don’t ask me.