Social Networking... Is Okay

The all-knowing Wikipedia suggests that the first ever modern social networking site was SixDegrees.com in 1997. I tried looking that up, but all I got was this:

Every time someone tells me to join a social networking site I resist. First it was MySpace. Didn't want to do it. I guess I thought it was stupid. Then I started to miss out on important social things, and my favourite bands were releasing 'MySpace only' songs. I begrudgingly joined and I've more-or-less hated it ever since. It's a real pain in the arse to use, it's ugly and who thought it was a good idea to give people with no web design skills the ability to infinitely customise their pages?

I don't use MySpace anymore. I'm totally over it.

It took me a long time to be convinced of the merits of Facebook, but eventually I got there. Facebook actually fixes all the problems I've got with MySpace, so I like it much better. Pages are pretty standard across the board, but you can add personal applications.

Allow me a moment of self-indulgence as I show you my flair board:

Thankyou. I do love it so.

Social networks are handy, because it saves room in my mobile phone. If I want to keep in contact with someone but don't particularly need to talk to the all the time then I can maintain the contact online. Also if I were to lose my mobile, my social network can act as a really handy backup.

The problem is that if everyone moves to a new social network (like they did with MySpace to Facebook) I'll have to move and remake all those old contacts again.

Another issue is privacy. Who is my 'friend' exactly? That girl from the grade above me who always flirted really innapropriately - to everybody. Do I want her knowing my email address? NO! Did she try and add me as a friend? Yes. Unfortunately.

Okay, so that example was a bit obvious, but what about your workmate from that job you had at the supermarket? Do you want him to know your mobile number? Or that friend-of-a-friend that you often see at parties?

Additionally, Facebook relies on people using their real names. If I'm trying to keep my real name a secret this can pose a problem, especially when I add friends I've made over the internet and I show up on stranger's "people you might know" lists.

Sometimes I resent being pestered by notifications that that guy from highschool has posted more party photos, but ultimately I feel like it's worth it. I've rediscovered some really good friends from as far back as Primary School. Also when I need to leave someone a note a social network is a better place than most to do it.

Rocking the Rock Rockers 2 - Gettin' an Educashun

The next two sites I want to cover are places that you go for learning about stuff. It's a fairly general subgrouping I know - that's what the internet is for isn't it?

Firstly, the W3Schools site has saved me from certain doom many, many times in the past. If you want to know anything about HTML code or all the other, more complicated, stuff that works with HTML code, then this is basically the only site you need to go to.

It's basically a site of tutorials on how to do stuff. All sorts of stuff. I'm not so hot at HTML, so I've used this site off and on for a while now - mostly to brush up when I've gotten rusty.There are step-by-step tutorials on how to do all sorts of things though. Things I've never even heard of before. It's a really well designed site too - easy to use.

The other site I'm going to talk about I've never actually used before Jason sent it to me in an email. MetaCritic is basically a reviews site that reviews everything - books, music, movies, DVDs, everything! Looking over their 'MetaScore' FAQ it looks like they don't actually have reviewers of their own, but that the site acts like a review-collector - compiling reviews from a number of sources. The only other site that I can think of which does a similar thing is rottentomatoes.com, but Rottentomatoes only reviews movies.

(EDIT 18/Mar/08: Fancy that, Wikipedia actually compares MetaCritic with Rottentomates as well. According to Wikipedia, MetaCritic mostly sources American critics, whereas Rottentomatoes mostly sources critics from the UK. This is an important difference because it often colours the reviews.)

Personally though, I don't think I'll use this site for my review needs. If you didn't have a good source for reviews, I think the multi-review aspect would be a great bonus. However I think that it could never be as good as one or two review sources that you personally find you really trust. For movies I use good ol' Margaret and David. They're not as snobby as you might think. With Margaret and David you don't just get the star rating (anything above 3/5 is worth seeing) but you also get their thought on why they thought it was good or not. That way I can still figure out if I'll hate a movie they said they loved, because of the reasons they give. I don't think you can ever get that with a huge multi-review site like MetaCritic.

Cute With Chris - Beep It

I'm supposed to go and look at some sites that Jason sent me, use them and then talk about my experience. I'll do that no worries, but I was up all last night worrying that I didn't convey the greatness of Cute With Chris enough last post. You may have been wondering "What is all this talk about a three-minute episode when the site linked to is clearly a blog?"

This is true. It's difficult to find the episodes via the website I linked you to.

In order to show you the episode and to prove I was at the lecture today (even though I was late - sorry Jason!), here is me embedding a YouTube video in a blog post:



I think this episode proves my point about the website quite nicely.

Four Unusual Sites - The Real Deal

So I didn't do it the day I said I would. I was out sailing. Then I went to go drinking but was unsuccessful. True story. But I'm here now and... NO MORE WRITING ABOUT THESE THINGS! WRITING IS FOR IMPORTANT THINGS LIKE TALKING ABOUT WEBSITES!

Website #1 - nataliedee.com

I think you will find, if you look in the archives, that this woman is possibly the cleverest woman ever in the history of the world. Cleverer than Boudica even. The genius of her content sneaks up on you over a period of days and then pounces! leaving you stuck checking back to her site semi-obsessively because as far as I can tell it doesn't work in my RSS reader.

The site itself isn't so genius I suppose. It's just meant to be user-friendly so that the user can get to the content easily. On the front page it has today's comic as well as easy links to the archives sorted by month. It also has at the top a clear site banner as well as three buttons leading to the current month's archive, the nataliedee t-shirt store and the nataliedee blog.

What I find most appealing about this site though, is the colours and 'feel'. I think they compliment the comics beautifully. The sunny pastel yellow fits right into the nataliedee 'feel' without overpowering the comics. Also the buttons have the same sorts of characters she tends to use in her comics - so it fits in really well.

The content itself gets my special seal of approval. It's just really out there. I don't really know anything like it except her husband's comics, and their collaborative comic.

Website #2 - Cute With Chris

What are you looking at? Don't judge me this show is wicked in all meanings of that word. There are ten of them, according to dictionary.com. Technically, the content I really love about this show I actually get from YouTube, considering Chris also posts his weekly episode on there, although they are available through the site too. Essentially the content of the blog (not including the weekly show) is made up of pictures viewers send in of their pets. Then Chris will respond to these pictures with a long series of in-jokes. "All your dreams are dead", "NO PICTURES!" and that sort of thing.

Normally I would not care too much for a site that just contained pictures of cute animals. The thing that makes this site unique from all the other billions of sites featuring pictures of cats is that it has the most twisted idea of the word 'cute' I've ever seen. Sure there are kittens, but there are also rabbits with elephantiasis eyes, chihuahuas with only their hind legs and cats that apparently like to stare at naked people's bums. Each week there is usually a 'cutedown' where viewers vote on which pet out of three is the cutest, and the weird pets almost always win.

Again, the site is nothing to look at - just a standard two-column setup, and actually the 'feel' could be improved a lot (it's very plain). It's the unique mix of content provided by Chris and his viewers that makes this site so enjoyable. The weekly three-minute video just backs it all up.

Website #3 - Postsecret

Notice a theme here? This site is ugly. I think it's just some kind of basic Blogger template. Ugh. All right, all right, I use a basic Blogger template as well, but at least mine has style. I think it's so the site itself doesn't detract from what the site is actually about - its content. The dude who runs this site receives people's secrets written on postcards in the mail. He scans them and posts them on the site. The secrets are sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes haunting. Sometimes I'll read a secret and realise that is my secret too and I never even realised I was keeping it from people.

The content of this site is so engaging. It just draws you in and makes you empathise/sympathise with the people who send them in. It makes other people around seem less like obstacles sent to try us and more like real people who we have to care about.

Website #4 - David Crowder*Band Website

I don't come here often - there are a lot of things about this site which rock, and a lot that suck. It doesn't fill up my whole screen for one, but if you bear with it, it can reveal some wonderful secrets.

At the time of writing the site is set up to resemble the packaging of their latest album, Remedy. The last time I looked at it, it wasn't green but yellow - to look like their album A Collision or (3+4=7). Yes, I'm not kidding you, that was the title of their album before Remedy. The most interesting thing here is the box near the bottom of the screen with the circles and the cross. It's a little hard to tell but these are the band's biographies. Obviously someone has given the individual band members free reign to do with the space what they want. For some this means a blog that hasn't been updated since September of 2006. For others however...

Click on circle 4 (on the lefthand side of the cross). This is the lead singer's biography. Now explore the graphic that pops up. I spent a long time trawling though the bits and pieces that are found there. Games, facts, reflections on scripture (DC*B are a Christian band) - even entire song-by-song descriptions of previous albums.

Additionally the site has secret pages that you only find out about if you buy the albums and read the thankyou notes in the booklet that comes with them. But because I'm such a nice guy here is the latest secret page.

So what do you reckon? Feedback please ^_^

Four Unusual Sites - Coming soon

My lecturer, Jason, says we are to find four unusual sites and write 100 words on each, which is a task that on the surface sounds very boring (sorry Jason, but do read on, I'm not this sad the whole way through). I understand that as a lecturer he has a mandate to be fairly specific about how many words we have to write, because I know that most uni students are trying to do as little work as possible. I know because there are times that I am one of them. I'm like "no way am I gonna write a bazillion words on some weird-arse websites - the writers have stopped striking and Lost is back on again."

For me, however, telling me to blog is like telling a child to eat lollies. I love to communicate with people I don't know... which even I'll admit is super-weird. I think that gets reflected in what I appreciate about a website, and so that will colour my observations and the websites I choose. I love blogs and YouTube. A lot. Unfortunately these kinds of websites tend to be very standard-looking. You know, the good ol' two-or-three column structure with the fat column in the middle(ish) and a heading at the top.

The thing is, what draws me to a site is never the site itself, but rather the content that the site contains. I even use an RSS reader which strips the content from the site completely. It'll just show up as ugly, bare text and pictures. I'm sure site designers just hate the guts out of me. I love it though because it lets me keep tabs of a multitude of blogs at a time without having to do anything more than sign into my Google account.

Actually, while I'm sure Jason knows all the tricks, if he hasn't set up a Google Reader to keep track of his classes' blogs it would probably be a good idea if he was really into the "I MUST KNOW EVERYTHING MY STUDENTS ARE SAYING ALL THE TIME AS SOON AS THEY SAY IT" kind of thing. I'm just saying you know...

And so because I've gotten off on a tangent and not actually done the set work, I'll talk about the sites tomorrow. I think I can get away with using mostly - mostly! - the sites I've already linked to even though they are fairly standard in how they are set up as sites. I have it written down: 100 words on content, look and feel of each site. I should find at least one freaky Heliozoa-esque site though, but not actually Heliozoa, because using your lecturer's site is just plain sucking up.