Social Networking Sites..

[The Curmudgeon]

Here's a scary thought - according to new stats, kids are now spending more time on social networking sites like Myspace/Bebo etc than they do watching TV. Unreal.

Anyway, I know Benjamin goes on Myspace, but as far as I know that's pretty much it (except me). I find that hard to believe, with such frequent net-heads on here. Are there no Bebo/Myspace/Twitter etc etc fans out there?

By the way, is Bebo a big deal in the US? It's pretty much the main one over here (and it SUCKS).

[trashcanman]

Haven't heard of Bebo. I'm not a social guy so I could give a shit about those sites. But I am on Lunch because it's got an amazing and flexible review system and a lot of my Amazon friends have fled the bullshit on that site, so we've moved over there so we can still trade reviews without the headaches that Ammie presents. I'm still writing reviews anyway, so sticking them up on another site isn't much of a problem. I actually get a ton more traffic on that site too, and it's not even open to the public yet. Amazon is about dead as far as review traffic goes. I've seen a near 75% drop in Profile Page views in the last month. So I do a little bit of social networking as a creative outlet, but as far as blogging about my daily life and posting pictures of my family and shit, I could care less about any of that.

[Benjamin Haines]

Facebook and MySpace are the only ones I'm registered on. The former I use more often because almost all of my college friends are on there, and with their nifty new instant messaging feature it's a great way of getting in touch with people for whatever reason. I can get online in the evening, see if one of my friends are online, IM them asking if it's cool if me and a few peeps come over, and we're off. Simple as that, and I don't have to use up any cell phone minutes or deal with the annoyance of texting.

I usually check MySpace at least once a day just because, but there's really not much activity on there for me. In my time in high school from Fall 2003 to Spring 2007, I found that high school teenagers in America are really, really into MySpace. I once overheard a girl on the school bus telling her friend about how she would spend minutes at a time on MySpace doing nothing but constantly refreshing the page to see if she had any new comments or messages. That's crossing some kind of line from telecommunication to obsession, no?

MySpace seems to be all but forgotten in college, as almost all of the students here seem to be regular Facebook users. It's an odd social dynamic where kids who graduate from high school and move on to college also seem to graduate from MySpace to Facebook.

Both of the sites are very convenient tools for keeping in touch with people. I much prefer Facebook, both because almost everybody with whom I keep in touch is on there (I only use MySpace to keep in touch with a handful of friends back home who are still in high school), and also just because it's a far more polished and organized site than MySpace. You don't have to deal with any of your friends having ridiculous layouts and sloppy effects on their profiles that make everything hard to see. Every profile looks the same on Facebook, and it's really easy on the eyes. Plus, just about every new feature MySpace has come up with over the past couple years or so has just been a ripoff of something that Facebook thought of first (photo tagging, applications, etc).

All that being said, I've noticed that it's not just college students who are into Facebook. My mother, many of my teachers, and a lot of my older co-workers seem to be just as into it as any college student if not moreso. And with both college students and adults, there are a lot of people who are spending far too much time on Facebook for their own good. Check out this article from CNN on just how big of an obsession Facebook has become for some people:

www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/23/ep.facebook.addict/index.html

Yeesh.

I have heard of other social networking sites (Bebo, Xanga, LiveJournal, Twitter), but I really couldn't care less about them. I think I could die happily decades from now without ever having seen what any of their home pages look like.