Social Networking To Me (Part II - The Websites)

Continuing our trek through the timeline of social networking, we arrive at a place… that I originally passed.  MySpace was all the rage at the beginning of my high school career.  Everyone had one: your best friend, that chick in Western Civ, your little sister, your favorite band, that weird Econ teacher, basically everyone except me.  At this point I was perfectly happy with sitting on AIM and talking to biddies.  Looking back on this decision to miss out on one of the epic social movements is likely due to one of three things (or all): a lack of appreciation for the site, a lack of internet speed, and a fear of not being included in people’s top friends.  At this point, I was still on a dial-up connection waiting minutes for webpages to load while Napster was running in the background downloading the top hits of the year.

Looking back, yea, I wish I would have had a MySpace.  I recently found out that some of my friends, who I thought were in the same boat as me, actually had a MySpace the whole time.  It truly is an experience that I missed out on:

- I never got the chance to surf the web to find that page background that fit me perfectly. 

- I never got to pick a name like “South-Side Chi-Guy” or ”Balla From Da Burbs” that allowed only people that I knew to know who I was.

- I never got to pick my top friends or be left out of someone’s top friends.

- I never got to take surveys asking me to choose between dark chocolate or milk chocolate, sprite or 7-up, BLUE or GREEN???

- I never got to post a blurb or blog vilifying someone who I hated, while never mentioning their name so I could preserve plausible deniability

- I never got to post my favorite (er, popular) songs on my profile so people could appreciate my taste in music.

- I never got to… alright, you caught me… I did have a MySpace.  And surprisingly, it’s somehow still active.

MySpace was the start of something revolutionary.  No longer was the internet comprised of e-mail, instant messaging, free Texas Hold ‘Em and 37% porn.  MySpace revolutionized it into a harbor for social activity.  Where nobodies like you and me could rub elbows with higher ups like actors, sports stars and musicians.  It created a world where every person in the world, regardless of stature, had the same size webpage as you and became 100 times more accessible.  This was the start of social networking.

I have been referring to MySpace thus far primarily in the past tense.  To clear that up for a second, it still is a functioning website that brings in nearly 50 million hits per month.  However it is widely considered to be past its prime.  It was passed a few years ago by its main competitor Facebook, a site that has become so popular that a movie was created to tell its early story.

Why did Facebook pass MySpace? Was it the features or the template of the site? Maybe.  In my opinion, the changing of the guard was due to its exclusiveness.  When Facebook began, only those who had a @harvard.edu email address were allowed to join.  Soon, all collegiate email addresses were allowed access to it and it became a sort of club that was only for college students; an online party.  Like college parties, soon enough high schoolers were bound to show up.  And that’s what I did.  Because I missed out on the whole MySpace experience, I was one of the first to jump on the Facebook bandwagon… and I loved it.

There was now a way for me to keep in contact with all of my friends and to meet new ones.  I am completely aware of how cheesy that sounds, but that’s exactly what it did.  Here was a place that I could display my pictures, write all about me, and create status updates as often as I wanted.  Yea, this website was awesome.  I quickly turned my friends onto it, setting their pages up with them in the library after school and then quickly turning around to be the first person to write on their wall.  With the old Facebook, you could personalize your profile with any app you wanted: iLike music, games, horoscopes, and ever girls favorite: picnic photo editing.  Sure, it was similar to MySpace, but so much different. 

Before I knew it, I was in poke wars with ones of people, constantly writing on peoples wall, making groups about everything and anything, and of course, changing friends’ profile info when they foolishly left their page logged in.  Really Chris, you’re interested in men, your favorite movies include Gangbangs of New York and Edward Penishands, and your birthday is tomorrow? So much I didn’t know about you.

The biggest thing that Facebook brought us was an action that coined one of the greatest terms of our generation – creepin’.  Everyone creeps.  It’s a fact.  You creep on your friends, your crushes, and anyone who hasn’t set their profile to private.  It’s just what you did.  One of the best days of the year for any guy on Facebook is when a smoking hot biddy gets back from spring break.  Within hours of her plane landing, you know exactly what to expect… the first thing she is going to do is put up her album; and the first thing you’re going to do is browse through it.  You used to be able to get as much information off a person’s profile page as you would in a first date.  People would put their life stories on their page for the whole world to read.  That’s where the creepin’ came in.

Facebook led to the demise of my former favorite internet tool, AIM.  With the advent of Facebook chat, my two favorite internet activities could be combined.  Now I can see our mutual friends WHILE talking to you, all in the same window? Great move Zuckerburg.  The only negative to this move was there was no more playing stupid with screen name identities and starting up random chats with “unknown names.”

A new site has jumped on the scene in the last year and gained an extremely large following.  By limiting everything to 140 characters, twitter is a simple and fun social networking site.  It’s perfect for all types of tweeters.  You have funny and comedic tweeters, your link to sports, news, athletes, celebrities, and of course the rest.

There are a lot of people out there who use twitter as a real source of news and other information and others who use it as nothing but a joke - hash tagging #anythingandeverything that they want to, even when it is completely #unnecessary.  I personally enjoy twitter more than the other social networks out there mostly because I only have to come up with 140 characters, instead of whole blog posts like this… #runningoutofmaterial.

So the question is: why am I blogging now?  Is it to compete with the same people who rejected my input over at Random Thoughts from "103.5 The Chill"?  Maybe a little.  But they’re more an inspiration then a competition.  I always thought blogs were for important people, celebrities, or people who had something to say.  But they aren’t.  They’re for chumps like me who have nothing to say, because honestly, no one is going to read it. 

Social Networking To Me (Part I - The Early Years and AIM)

“Everyone’s doing it!”  Those three words are most likely the reason that people like you and me are writing on your friend’s wall, hash tagging 140 characters and composing meaningless thoughts into a blog that no one is going to read.  More than anything, those three words scare people.  They’re afraid to be left behind socially and left out of the loop.  With the way social networking sites have seriously altered personal relationships, people often consider themselves lost if they haven’t had internet access for more than a few hours, myself included.


           So let’s break down (in multi-part posts) this social networking revolution as it happened to me and in the most basic and easy way to remember it… chronologically.

           It all started one great day when the UPS delivery person arrived at our house with an extremely large, heavy, cow-hide patterned box.  This box contained the first computer that my family ever owned a Gateway 2000.  The greatest thing about this state-of-the-art computer wasn’t the 200 MB hard drive, floppy disk drive or Windows 95; it was a program known as America On-Line or AOL for short.  Everyone who had a computer had AOL because as far as I know, that’s the only way you could get on the internet.  In addition to AOL you needed two very important things: a phone cord to connect your computer and no one in your family expecting a phone call.  By possessing these essential items, you were primed and ready to hear the most annoying sound in the world followed by the greatest sound in the world.


           Once online, the whole world was at your fingertips.  You could look up anything you wanted to; barring you we’re willing to wait about a minute for each page to load or fifteen to listen to a song.  But that’s not what you were looking for.  Now that you’ve logged into AOL under your own screen name, you could go on AOL Instant Messenger or AIM and talk to all of your friends.  But before I dive further into the features and perks of the Instant messaging, let’s talk about one of the most important decisions that a late 90’s or early 00’s pre-teenager had to make: choosing your screen name.


           This is a decision that you contemplated in class, discussed with friends, and most importantly had to get approved by your parents.  After days of deliberation, you finally came up with the best 3-10 character combination of your nickname, soccer number, favorite food and sports team; and now it was time to start setting up your account.  You first enter your name, birthday (about 5-7 years older), gender and a bunch of other random stats.  You then get the chance to type in your new identity to the online world… only to find out that it isn’t available.  What do you do now?  Go back to the drawing board and create a new super-awesome name?  Nope.  Much easier solution: add XoXo’s, misspell something, add random numbers, anything to alter that name just slightly enough so that your screen name is now available.


           So now that you’re on AIM, who do you talk to?  You just made your account, so you have no one on your “Buddy List.” Only thing to do add SmarterChild and try to trip him up.  He was good though, always playing dumb when the talk got real.  Never said any bad words, kept the conversation flowing and clean, and best of all was always online to talk to.  SmarterChild was always there to chat when there was no one else online, and was one of the best secret keepers out there.


           Once you grew tired of ambiguous responses from “bots” you had to fulfill a responsibility to yourself and your future buddies by creating and constantly updating your Buddy Info.  This was the best way to share all of your feelings, opinions and thoughts…  Or you could fill it with codes that entered the viewer’s screen name into a “____ 's mom is so fat" jokes, add a view counter that you run up so that people think you’re popular, fill it with your favorite quotes, and of course give a special shout out to your best friends.


           Flash forward to the next day in school, you sit at your desk eagerly awaiting all your classmates to show up so you can pass them all notes to get their screen names so that you can write to them later about that very note that you just passed them.  You don’t ask everyone for their screen names, and for a very good reason.  You go home that day with your starting list of 5-10 friends ready to do some damage.   You call each of them up, and see when they can tie up their phone lines so you can chat on the internet (of course that makes sense).  Now you’ve logged on, have your buddy list up, and start entering your friends screen names.  To keep them all organized, you create groups to put them all in.  You have groups like “Boyz,” “Girlies,” “Baseball,” “School,” “Camp” and of course “Ignore.”


            Now, one of the bigger perks of AIM was the ability to create your own buddy chat.  In this window, you could have as many of your closest friends and/or enemies all reading what each person is saying.  This always led to the best of confrontations between people.  There would at first be casual talk, about how everyones day was and reminiscing on things that happened over the weekend or in class, until someone crossed the line.  At that point, peoples courage grew infinitely strong.  People could say exactly what they wanted to say to a person, without saying it to their face.  Once one person started raining the hate, it came from everyone and hit everyone.


            Let’s not forget about away messages.  Intended to let people know that you were away from the computer, they were rarely used for that.  They mostly contained song lyrics, quotes, jokes and pretty much anything that you wanted to write, except where you were or what you were doing.  Essentially, they were an extension of your buddy info.  The most interesting part was that you were never away when you an away message up, because if you actually left, you signed out.  


            Now the reason that you didn’t get everyone’s screen names was so you could pull this little trick off.  You know that cutie in your class that you really have a crush on but are too afraid to talk to?  Well, now is your chance.  You simply get that crushes “sn” from one of your friends and send a message that starts like this “hey saw this sn on my buddy list who r u?” and before you know it you guys are hitting it off talking about just about anything until they g2g for dinner.  It’s the perfect plan that worked just about every time.  Only problem is that the ease of talking online never transfers into real life and you still are too nervous to talk to your crush outside AIM.


           Even though your favorite conversation has ended, you look to the bottom of your screen and see three or four flashing yellow windows letting you know that there are still plenty of people to talk to… before your sister gets to use the computer in 10 minutes.