Remember Orkut? It’s Google’s social networking app that debuted in 2004 and became all the rage among the digerati for a while, especially since you had to be invited to be able to sign up for the service. Well, it wasn’t all that hard to get an invite, and so people descended on the thing like hungry locusts, tossing around invites like so much confetti, and for a while it seemd like Google had “done it again”. Except nobody had bothered to really think about what the hell they were supposed to do with it, and when it became readily apparent after about three months that there wasn’t anything to do with it except invite people and build buddy lists, everybody stopped using it. Except the Brazilians. Orkut transformed into the single most popular social networking application in Brazil, and is now mostly in Portuguese, catering to the interests of a much more specialized group.
That was my first exposure to social networking, and as such turned into the formative experience that led me to avoid the more recent fad for social networking websites. After all, how different could they be from Orkut when you got right down to it, and how long would it take for them to similarly collapse like neutron stars and become singularities?
About six months ago, though, I joined Twitter. Twitter seems to have reduced the concept down to the barest elements. The 7th-Grade cliquish crap of adding and deleting friends is still a large motivator for the whole thing, but the interaction has been reduced to tiny messages. It’s the bastard stepchild of social networking and instant messaging, and the appeal to people who wanted to blog but couldn’t come up with anything to say day after day was huge. It didn’t bowl me over, and I discovered that I really didn’t have anything to say that could be reduced to 140 characters, so I don’t use it all that much. When I do use it, I have to wade through a few people who either have to post every little thing they do all day (“Going to wipe my ass just as soon as the rest of this turd comes out”) or post vague and inscrutable statements that only mean something inside their own minds. I probably only check it once a week and find I am not missing all that much.
So yesterday, after much consideration, I joined Facebook (NOTE: you have to BE a Facebook member to visit that link), since it seems that over the past year it has gone completely mainstream. As somebody who usually gets in on the ground floor of a lot of aspects of digital life, it seemed like I was overdue to have this experience. That was completely confirmed for me as I went through the signup process and Facebook sucked up all my contact list data and started showing me how many of my very non-digital friends were long-time members. Other people have commented on discovering that their grandmother or their parents were on Facebook, and while that isn’t the case for me, I did find my youngest brother and a whole bevy of people that I would never have expected would be on board.
Quite frankly, that tells me that Facebook and MySpace and the other big-time social networking sites are about to turn into the next AOLs, if they haven’t already. Your hip, cool young person does not want to be associated with his or her grandma on a social website, and if it’s something that has gotten tame enough for grandma to use, there must be something cooler and edgier. For us middle-aged geezers, it’s clear that the whole appeal of the site is to look up old acquaintances and make fun of the ones that have gotten fatter/balder/saggier than you and burn with jealousy over the ones who are more successful/thinner/married-up than you. But once every 40-something in America has had a good chuckle at their senior class rival, they’re going to stop looking at the site and go find some more porn to watch online.
The other evening at the “career transition” support group I attend, one of the women, who was laid off from an executive secretarial job after 20 years and is having a hard time adjusting to modern job-seeking, said that she felt quite thwarted to see job listings where “ability to use social networking sites” was a job requirement. I can understand her flummoxedness (flummoxity? flummel?), but I found myself shaking my head to think of the pointy-headed bosses who somehow think this is the Next Big Thing and they’re going to score big if they can get X number of friends on their Facebook. Time to start learning Portuguese, fellas.
I did find one college friend I hadn’t heard from in six or seven years, but I was pretty sure I was going to see him there anyway. Honestly, I am pretty much in touch with anyone I want to be in touch with from high school or college, so I’m not likely to go seeking out long-lost childhood chums. Once the initial spurt of “friending” is done, I presume I’ll spend very little time with Facebook. I have plenty of other online distractions as it is.
I didn’t join Facebook until very recently because all my Internet girlfriends were on it. I think my 24-year-old daughter is avoiding it like the plague because I’m on there. She’s still mortified that I’m on MySpace.