Reflections on the Social Network

"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." 

Muhammad Ali 

My first social network site that i truly have nursed and love from the beginning is Friendster. I was hooked to it during its highest peak of fame. Time flies when i'm logged into it, clicking pictures and profiles, checking out who has viewed my profile, updating my shout out, uploading pics and incessantly staring at the screen with countless finding and inviting acquaintances, friends and human beings that seem attractive and tugging in my perspective just by looking at their photos staring back at me in return. The law of diminishing returns has its say, proving once again that as you use a service over and over again, the tendency of its effectiveness will decline after you achieve a certain level of result. Thus, tending me to deactivate and totally abandon Friendster. 

Then came Twitter, it was a flop at first use on my part. It wasn't a click on the starting stage of my usage until just recently that i came to realize and appreciate the beauty and significance of having a twitter account. Ironically, i only have 34 followers and i'm only following 30. I really don't care about the numbers. I became cautious of who i follow now since i don't want to get pissed off and dis-entertained by such annoying tweets. Really! it's so unnerving and unpleasant to see on my timeline of  those unnecessary tweets from people. No offense meant but receiving a 10-30 tweets a day from one person is just so unacceptable, not to mention that some are just being well-off or worse being bland and tasteless on what they are tweeting. Now imagine if you are following 20 persons with that same kind of tweetitude ethics, they are now flooding your timeline with garbage with unintelligible it's none of business shout outs from their profiles. So, without any guilty feelings, i had to drop some of my followers. It was kinda hard of course, it's like having no heart at all. But doing so means freeing some space on my bucket, filtering the flow of data into a much sensible one especially in the case of information overload.

The unavoidable Facebook, i couldn't count now on my fingers how many times i have deactivated and reactivated my fb account, this i perceived at times as a waste of time, but it's like a metaphor of plunging myself into licking my favorite ice cream flavor during the summer. I recently liked Mark Zuckerburg's fb page (of course im talking about here the like button from facebook). With the advent of the movie The Social Network (which i'm so eager to see), it defines more of my intense grip in spreading and nurturing my social network presence, thus i created a page for my macdosage blog. Which i'm requesting you to Like it just in case you're reading this post. (ehem!)

On the lighter side of things, dull moments are killed when i'm into facebook, reality check that is. Please negate me thru the comments below if you disagree. While this thing is so immense now into the daily activities whenever we are surfing the net, we must not forget that privacy still matters. The trend, if not the majority now i'm seeing on facebook is that, their personal identities are so much into the open. I learnt this by clicking people's profile that aren't even my friends, (prolly only Friends of Friends), and yet i can see their personal phone number with matching specified addresses and locations, those glaring photos geotagged and those pics that must have been for the eyes of their loved ones only, are now being exposed to whoever the user is (that's quite alarming, you don't want a stranger snooping at your personal stuff, don't you?).  Of course, each of us has its own prerogative. 

But come to think about it. Privacy still does matter. And it's a big deal.

~mAc