friend of a friend of a friend of...

[egypturnash]

So I'm idly looking at bard_bloom's journal because postvixen mentioned, in passing, that she was suddenly intensely curious about a pseudo-quiz he'd started in his journal, or maybe semi-OOC in his fictional-character sythyry journal. One about your real self, hypothetical ideal self, self in ideal worlds, etc. It sounded familiar but it's who knows how long ago? Past the point where digging backwards in LJ goes to 'Previous Day' instead of 'Previous 20'.

Anyway, behind a locked entry was a note that he'd signed up for Orkut, which, at the time, was the Social Networking Website Of The Month. I mostly know that Orkut was the SNWOTM at the time because I read bOingbOing semi-regularly, and Cory "Whuffie" Doctorow is a sucker for these things. To the point where I seem to remember him quickly going from gushing that Google + SNWOTM = R0XX0R to whining about being deluged in Orkut invite e-mails.

It seems that's the way a lot of these SNWOTMs spread - someone you want to list as a friend's not on it, it asks for their email and send them an invite. And maybe sends them email for acknowledgment if you try to list them as a friend, too. I'm not sure. None of the damn things ever let you poke around much without joining first, and I have this curious aversion to typing personal data into a db I may never want to use, or even to making up bogus data, just to poke around.

And I got to thinking that, yknow, I never got a single SNWOTM invite e-mail, ever.

Friendster seems to have faded. Orkut seems to have vanished from geek discourse after a round of 'oh no the overly-broad lawyerese for it's okay if we serve this info from multiple machines means they have clear and malicious intent to steal your soul'. The other ones, um, I vaguely remember hearing about one called Tribe, and there were probably two or three others in the past year or two, they're all gone. I guess I'll never get flooded with "Mister Sniggles wants you to join SNWOTM!" email, ever, because I think the fad ran its course.

Maybe this says something about the circles I move in. Or maybe it says I'm a bitchy recluse who's got a history of pretty much succeeding at her attempts to not have any friends. I dunno.

This is not your cue to go to your dusty old SNWOTM account and send me an invite, either. It's not something I ever really got from the stuff I read about them. It always just sounded like huge collections of LJ bio pages without the actual journals.

It just feels weird to see a remnant of what seemed like a big, trendy, hip geek fad that passed me by with barely a hair disturbed from its passage.

---

Speaking of social networks, I finally caved in and joined Shane Glines' Drawing Board, like every other damn person who's ever worked at Spümcø or thinks Spümcø is way cool seems to have done. Only three or four years after they all did. Why? 'Cause I wanted to try and get in touch with Vincent Waller to ask him something, and don't have the Spümcø phone list anywhere handy, and think the one I'd have would be outdated anyway; sending him a PM on that board seemed like a good chance of getting him, 'cause I know most of the Spümcø types go there regularly. I doubt I'll hang out there, though. The main attraction, at least from what made it come up in conversation around Spümcø, seems to be having flamewars with Bill Wray, or baiting certain hangers-on.

(Oh, and I found the quiz posted all OOC-like on Sythyry's journal that made me start looking in the first place before this diversion into the fad for codifying social relationships in code. Don't think I'm awake enough to answer it right now.)

Comments

[protocat.livejournal.com]

I've yet to be impressed with any of those groups. I was invited to Okrut by several folks and finally accepted one. Two days later, I had to *EMAIL* someone to politely ask them to delete my account. An actual human had to process the email and delete.

At least I can claim I deleted my account before most had their own. [/goth-trend-whore]

When you think about it.. those groups are trying to streamline the idea of a LiveJournal's friends list without any of the content (i.e. the journal) to back it. I really don't see it as being worth much time, but then again, I'm apparently not like most people.

[revar.livejournal.com]

Okay, if it's like friends lists, without the actual blog content, then what exactly is the point? It seems hideously masturbatory to just codify a friends relation database, without anything to go with it. Err, kind of like most memes that run around livejournal, now that I think of it.

Though I bet the idea of getting ahold of that social matrix data must make marketing folks drool.

I just don't see any positive social effects for the end user.

Then again, I also haven't recieved any invites, and only know hearsay about the design of these sites.

[protocat.livejournal.com]

That's because most people are hideously masterbatory, but perhaps I'm just too cynical.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I think the point of these social network websites is, well, to give bloggers, who don't qhite have something like the friends list, a friends list. Except detatched from the function of conglomerating all the blogs you want to read regularly.

LJ added "FOAF" data - "Friend Of A Friend" - a while back, based on the existing friends-list data - and I poked around the sites about this "format" that the announcements pointed to and found it utterly impenetrable. (Look in lj_research or lj_nifty to find references tohis kinda thing, I believe.)

[barberio.livejournal.com]

Centralised online social network mappers like these dont work. RL relationships are dynamic, variable and very hard to quantify. All of which makes it almost imposable to write a database to store all this information.

Most of these 'social networks' force you to divide your friends up into its choice of categories. Which is imposable, because human relationships are not state based.

The closest I've ever seen to a solid working 'social network' site was the now defunct www.snogweb.com which categorised your social network by who you had snoged, groped, done or had sex with. (With stated definitions)

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

that sort of stuff is going on bard_bloom from now on.

And ... these social network website thingies are getting dorfy.