Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Saw THAT Coming

Come on, doesn't anybody remember Orkut?

There have been a bunch of articles about big, bad Facebook, like this one at The Guardian. And this one:

Facebook is - to borrow a word from my teenage years - sad. It is no substitute for personal encounters, for phonecalls and letters, for the genuine effort that is required to maintain a friendship. Of course, I doubt many people will take my route.

Hey, that guy is cool, eh? He has personal encounters. Can you imagine such a thing? And he was on Facebook before anyone else and now he's the first to give it the heave-ho. How cool is that? It's so cool, nobody else can follow! ... Or can they?

The past taught us that anything on the internet that inflates as fast as Facebook deflates just as quickly as people tire of the novelty or move on to the next thing. Like Orkut. A few weeks after joining that social networking site I had 500 "friends" from Brazil. Then I never visited Orkut again.

And now -- surprise -- the same thing is happening with Facebook:

On Facebook behaviour seems much the same; join, accumulate dozens of semi-friends, spy on a few exes for a bit, play some Scrabulous, get bored, then get on with your life, occasionally dropping in to respond to a message or see some photos that have been posted.

Really, how much social networking do you really want to do? The real question is: what do you do next? I'm sticking with my plan to only participate in every other internet phenomenon. I skipped MySpace and went right to Facebook. I'll mull around on Facebook during The Next Big Thing and hop on board when The Next, Next Big Thing happens.

And we all know what that's going to be: Porn Scrabble.

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