Whither Friendster? Whither Facebook? Whither the next big thing?

[samedietc]

when the rubble clears from the great friendster crash of '04, i will have nothing. ben will have nothing. none of us will have anything. no more friends. no more testimonials. no more instant self-assurance nor affirmation of life's few treasures. nothing. zero. abcess. lack. waste. enemies.
Danny Gibson wrote that testimonial for me in 2003, and

Comments

[samedietc]

Curious thought: while Facebook clearly has more (3rd-party) applets than Friendster, the Facebook Wall is essentially the Friendster Testimonial system with the difference that the Wall was specifically designed for on-going communication; that's both a function-difference (the ability to see "wall-to-wall" chats) and an idea-difference (since Testimonials really don't sound like communications that go back and forth, but sound rather like one-time endorsements). Think, for instance, of the "Dave Warth stepped in" series of testimonials--something like that could have kept people going back to Friendster, if only there were some way the website itself urged people towards ongoing interactions.

As for mass migrations, another thing to note about the social networking sites is that it makes efficient sense to travel with the group--you can complain that everyone else is doing it, but on some level, what makes social networking work is that everyone else is doing it. Now: what are they doing when they are doing it?

I'm actually a little skeptical over the internet changing the way we live. Or maybe we agree--like you say, the internet meets its potential by allowing us to live online the same lives we live offline--nasty, brutish, and short. But I feel that's less a function of the internet's structure than a historical happenstance. Can we imagine it doing something else?

[tragic_ohara]

Well, when I say 'changing the way we live', I mean in the very quotidian sense that we check our messages constantly now, expect instant returns on our communicative efforts, are accustomed to a bombardment of poorly-filtered information and to plumbing that information for any little question, etc. I don't know that it's brought about a greater cultural shift or anything.

I suppose what I was saying is that we can imagine it doing all sorts of things, but I'm pessimistic that it will ever do them. I think shopping and porn and scams and blog posts and fan fiction and news feeds and specious Wikipedia articles are pretty much what the Internet is going to do, although it will probably find newer and flashier ways of going about it as time goes on.

[samedietc]

as in the whole split between my past-nostalgia and my future-anticipation, i am also split between thinking quotidian and thinking utopian: the everyday changes are super-important, but i wonder if the changes are mostly cosmetic--are our email checking habits all that important? (this all raises the question of how important habit/style is or could ever be.) what i mean is, aren't specious Wikipedia articles, for instance, just a new form of specious books and pamphlets--is there a real difference between me publishing an anti-Semitic paper tract and me maintaining an anti-Semitic website (or even, say, writing/publishing the hoax Protocols)?

Bonus question: can we really imagine the internet being different? I mean, imagining some possible technological changes (which I have no knowledge of: what are people researching these days), give me some possible Internets.

[tragic_ohara]

I think the changes I listed are all about degree of immediacy, rather than behavioral change or substantive change in content. So I think we agree that life online is pretty much an organic extension of life elsewhere, just faster and more* connected (parodies have always been written; now they go up on Youtube within half an hour of the original - people have always been sexually aroused by wearing diapers; now they can network rather than hide it).

I'm not up on possible new technologies either, and I don't have the savvy to predict which of them will actually come into the mainstream, but again, it'll be the same old Internet repainted, is my feeling.

*And simultaneously less, as per the point about weak ties.

[jundai]

Perhaps it makes more sense to think of it as changing the way we relate to each other and the world around us, rather than the way we live. You could also think of it as a suite of technological advancements in communication that have occurred (and are continuing to occur) over the Internet as a backbone. These advancements haven't happened in a void; rather they are occurring alongside other technological and social developments.

The fact that we are here discussing this here is an interesting case in point. This fills a place in our life, however minor, for which there is little or no analogy prior to the development of inter-connected computer networks. 30 years ago, would a handful of college friends, all around the age of 30, scattered across the country be idly chatting about the very medium they were chatting on? What medium would that be?

Has the Internet had as significant impact on the way we relate to one another and understand the world around us as, say, the phone, radio, television, the airplane, or the cell phone? Possibly not, but it is pretty significant nonetheless.

Of course there's a huge question about what we mean by "we". Radio and cell phones aside, these technologies have had a significant direct impact on somewhere around 1/6th of the world's population. As for indirect impact, it would be very hard to measure these things.

For me of course, it would be hard to imagine my life without the Internet: it provides me with a career and I also waste more time over the Internet than through any other single activity.