Internet Culture

This is going to be a discussion that might bump up against the limits of acceptable meta as far as blogging is concerned. I am not all that interested in being yet another blog about blogging or site design. This is mostly because my world really doesn't have much to do with blogging or site design beyond having a blog and having designed the site. And Meta Is Murder.
This post is about forums. Specifically, this post is about web forums and the communities that I've found around them over the last several years.
If you love forums, or even just like forums, even if just a little bit, may I suggest not reading this? Just because I don't like them doesn't mean you should do something that will probably just make you angry.
I will try to keep the meta to a minimum. The forum bashing, that I'll make no promises about.

The new thing happening on Facebook is their pushing their "automatic Friend Finder." And honestly, I find that their method is overly aggressive and borders on offensive.
I know that a lot of services have a feature where an address book, instant messaging roster and other services' roster and search for people who are also using the service in question, but please don't lie to people saying I found most of my friends this way. And yet, Natalie gets a banner stating that I used the service they're pushing (to mind my non-Facebook contact data) to find "many of my friends." Me? ORLY? I don't think so.
As I've said before, I do not normally add people, even people I think I know well enough to add, until I get a request from the person. It's really the only way I won't feel guilty about the amount of quality of the noise I sometimes tend to post.

I titled the last post , and honestly, I talked about the spaghetti monster map, not about Social Media. So, the title wasn't honest. And the content was clearly on the side of snoring-at-the-keyboard boring.

Really, social media has not changed my life. Not that much, if at all. I still sit in loft here at the house working everyday. I am sitting here alone. I am answering questions via phone, work's instant messging system and e-mail. I do usually have an app or two running on one of the machines that monitors some of the social networking sites where there are people I actually might follow, and Linux apps exist to present the activity/update/life stream.
And watching, normally just out of the corner of my eye is pretty much all I do. I don't interact. I don't participate in any of that Social Network's games. And I most certainly don't let those games or apps or whatever have posting rights to my activity stream. That way leads madness.
Yes, I'm boring.

OR How I discovered how incredibly uninteresting I really am.

When I first started with Twitter and Facebook and MySpace, I really didn't expect anythign meaningful to come of it. I could see the possibilities that hte technologies presented, but I could also see the issues that bubbled beneath the surface.

My experimentation with MySpace didn't last all that long. In the time since I abbandonded the MySpace account (Sept 2007) to now, my attention has been paid to other services. Almost the same day, I created a Twitter account. About a month later I created an account on Facebook, about the day Facebook opened up the service to anyone and everyone.

Three years seems like a really long time to be using these services. And at times, each and every one of them loses whatever appeal they may have had.

How Google Wave changed my life

Short version, it hasn't.

I'm sure that when everyone has actually figured out what Wave is good for, there will be some nontrivial change to how some things age done on the Internet. But when it does happen, will it even be the type of thing that most people are even going to notice?

Right now, Wave feels like this massive web forum, only without a whole lot of structure. And, from a content persective, governance and direction.

To be honest, this doesn't surprise me. It's a whole new information and community space. And this space, compared to the Internet as a whole, is limited to just those of us that have been invited.

I'm not surprised by, and at the same time bothered by the number of public waves that have a title that says something like "The Official X wave" when there isn't any indication that the owner of the wave has anything to do with whatever that wave is about. Other than being a fan.

I don't have a problem with fan sites (or waves), but one does have to wonder when the disputes over which fan's wave is the *real* official wave for content X. At least until the owners of X get a chance to post their own wave.

Wait, this is starting to feel a little bit like what's happening on Twitter accounts or Facebook with pages. And we've already seen plenty of this happen with forums, when IP/concept/product owners/artist started hosting their own communities, when a somewhat mature fan community already existed with pages and fora of their own.

I don't know yet where Google Wave is going to go. I fully expect at some point I'll be embedding something of Wave into SysMango.com, but until they get at least read-only anonymous access, there isn't going to be value to having content that only about 200,000 (my guess) people ableto even see. And the odds of any of them ever seeing SysMango.com . . . slim. Very slim.

Of course, this is me on Google wave, day 4. We will have to wait and see what develops.