Do YOUR Parents Use Del.icio.us?
So, my parents can e-mail, IM and text. Already that’s pretty impressive. Should I try to turn them on to del.icio.us?
I mean, these are people who used to listen to RECORDS. And use TYPEWRITERS. They’ve come a long way. What do you think? Maybe social bookmarking is just the next leap for them…
If you (or your parents) haven’t already, check out How to Explain Del.icio.us to Your Parents.
Also, if you’ve explained it to them, do your parents actually use this stuff?
Mourning the XuQa Zoo: Part 1
Some of you may be reading this thinking, “Who is this Amanda girl, anyway? Where did this n00b come from?” Um, I’m actually a former celebrity. A XuQalebrity to be exact. Never heard of me? Well, that’s because XuQa, the little college social networking site that had so much amazing potential, failed.
XuQa came around at the right time for the original crew. Back in September 2005, I found the fledgling little XuQa.com in its infancy. I had been on Facebook and MySpace, of course, but this was something fresh, something new.
XuQa had the personal profile, the “friending” capabilities, the message wall and all the obvious features we’ve come to expect from social networking sites. On XuQa you could also have an anonymous crush on someone and you could send your friends free gifts (years before Facebook caught on to that bright idea). But XuQa also had a bustling forum section, and for me, that made this little social network stand apart from its larger competitors.
I can’t lie– I used to spend hours on XuQa, responding to the never-ending stream of forum threads with topics ranging from political debates to hotness ratings to someone professing his love for one of the XuQa it-girls (me?).
People said exactly what they wanted to say without holding back. It was such an interesting little corner of the Internet—no one was afraid to offend, praise, announce or bash anything or anyone they wanted. In the beginning, XuQa really was a champion of social conversation.
So, why did XuQa fail?
It failed because it eventually alienated its core members. The sociology of the site’s changes was all wrong. The XuQa creators suddenly shifted the site’s norms, values and social format without warning.
Poker. Blatant popularity levels based on how many poker games you played. A shift in the cultural focus—in my opinion, you can’t have a thriving social networking site that markets itself equally to American college students and anyone with an e-mail address in Turkey.
Most of us all just got fed up. XuQa members who had been active and instrumental in creating the exciting social environment could literally no longer have the same XuQa experience they had come to love.
And it’s a shame. While we were creating and developing our own little Internet society, complete with codes of ethics, rules, norms and values, the makers of the site had some other agenda. One day, the entire site changed. Instead of focusing on conversation, XuQa decided to turn the site into a spam-filled, vapid waste hole. Thanks.
Imagine if you woke up one day and Twitter was suddenly all about fish, and if you didn’t have a comment about fish, then you couldn’t be part of the discussion. Um, of course you’d leave the site.
As social media adopters, when we are building social networks and helping develop micro-societies on the Web, we need to do more than just observe and pass judgment. As bloggers, we walk a fine line between commenting on what we think we see and analyzing what’s actually there.
I think there’s a large lesson to be learned from XuQa. We can’t always assume we know what people want, and if we only scratch the surface, we may miss the nuances that keep social networking micro-societies alive and kicking.
My cohorts and I loved this site–it gave us friendships, laughs and a very real sense of bonding within a community–but the creators of the site didn’t listen to the people who made XuQa what it was, and their changes have left the site a broken shell of what it used to be.
An Open Letter to MySpace, My Former Flame
Dear MySpace,
How I used to love thee.
We were like best friends. I mean, you were there when I needed skeezy strangers to hit on me. You were there when I needed people to steal my photos and info and make fake profiles of me. You never denied me the spam I so desperately craved. And, of course, you were always there when I needed a new boyfriend.
But, honey, you need to face reality-we’ve drifted apart.
Thousands upon thousands of MySpace users delete their profiles every day. You started hanging out with a punk crowd and a lot of people just got fed up with it. But plenty of people who don’t delete (because god forbid they lose that sense of pride associated with knowing that they’ve had 68,293 profile views since 2005) don’t actually USE their profiles anymore. We all know how you love to feel used. Now I read this, and it’s heartbreaking watching you beg.
So, MySpace, your idea of foreplay is to sift through my interests and give me targeted ads? Romantic. Attractive… No.
I’m not coming back to you because you think you know me now. You couldn’t possibly know what I want from a tiny list of half-sarcastic interests. For all you know, the whole list could be a joke. Yes, I want you to be concerned with what I want and what I like, but if you only ever scratch the surface AND have no sense of humor about it, you’ll never reach anyone, let alone me. I can picture you sitting there saying, “OK, so Amanda says she’s interested in ‘ice cream, pedicures and poop.’ Time to work the ad magic.” If you take that route, babe, you’re hopeless.
It’s like a bad teen movie coming to life. I mean, this sort of feels like you want to look inside my underwear drawer. Everyone knows I wear underwear and I’m sure plenty of people have seen some of my stash, but it’s like you turned into some loser after I left and now you want to put your digital paws all over my skivvies to reconnect. Who do you think you are- McLovin?
My favorite quote of the Yahoo! article comes from Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a California-based nonprofit: “Many young people don’t seem to have privacy protection instincts.” Well, maybe we’ll develop said instincts once we feel that sites we once loved are becoming shady and intrusive. We grew up in a world where information flows freely and our peers weren’t afraid to share. Day by day, though, that’s changing. Ask any man out there: you can’t read minds. Don’t try.
Oh, and what are you going to do with people who haven’t updated their profiles in two years? We both know that I’m not interested in the same things today that I liked back in 2005. Yeah, I used to be interested in college and dating, but I’m over all that. It’s like when you’re 17 and one of your relatives gives you a goofy stuffed animal as a birthday gift. You force a smile for a second because you noticed the effort, but inside you just want to scream, “WHY DID YOU SPEND MONEY ON THIS?!”
MySpace, you look really desperate right now, but I’m over you. You used to be fun and social and-dare I say it- sexy. Now you’re just boring. Maybe you should go prey on these easy lays, and please, please try to get over me.
Honey Bees, Of Course
Scott Baradell of Media Orchard gives us the following math equation:
And no, I don’t have one of those outfits… yet.
While Britney Was Killing Her Career, GM Was Turning it On
I almost turned off the 2007 VMAs after I saw Britney pseudo-lip-synching during her gigantic failure of a perform-mess, but I’m glad I kept the award show on long enough to see some commercials from the new GM-Chevy Volt campaign. The funniest part of it was that the day before, E and I were talking about car brands and he couldn’t remember what the Chevy symbol was. I tried to explain the sideways parallelogram and the little slash through it, but he still couldn’t even picture it. I was thinking, “Damn, I kind of feel bad for you as a brand, Chevz. My boyfriend, who actually knows a lot about cars, can’t even picture your brand icon.”
Lo and behold, the next day, I had the pleasure of seeing some new Chevy commercials, which, in my opinion, were delicious. So, after I finished screaming, “There! There! That’s the symbol! I told you it was a parallelogram,” and pointing like a lunatic at the TV screen, I shut up long enough to actually watch this endearing little spot.
I mean, everyone and their grandma is “going green” and I’m getting sick of hearing about how eco-friendly you are, but something about this really just hit me the right way. The absurdity of each spot’s premise (pug licking feet, fairy playing the freaking ocarina of time or something…) cancelled out the seriousness of preaching about going green and saving the environment and all that jazz. And wouldn’t we be more likely to listen to these energy evangelists if it poked fun at itself? Don’t lecture to me about how I suck at turning lights on because I don’t use energy-saving bulbs– show me a dog tongue-bathing someone as an alternative to showering.
