paraphilia

I don’t like MySpace.  I never really did.  I always thought it was a piece of crap as far as community and technology goes.  Facebook though is a bit more interesting.  First some background.

There are “online communities” on the Internet be they forums, chat servers, online games, or otherwise.  Regardless of the tribal structure nearly all of these communities share a common characteristic: anonymity.  This can have good or bad effects but it changes how we act and who we are (in the perceived sense) in these communities.  In general though the process can be explained by John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.  As the Internet (and computer stuff in general) left the realm of the “dork” or “geek” and became “cool” large swaths of our society began interacting with each other using the Internet.  Most of these newer cool people fell into two groups: those looking for tail, and “your mom” (because the Internet has games and most moms tend to follow “cool” trends in our society; don’t ask me why, I’m trying to figure that out).  Both of these groups of people aren’t particularly interested in anonymity or it actively hinders the reason they’re there.  So was born “Social Networking” which bridged the borders between the online communities and the real world communities.

So why the paragraph of explanation?  The first one to really take off the US was MySpace, and its model makes more sense when you get a little historical context of who was using it, why, and what their expectations of interaction and anonymity were.  MySpace allows a middle-ground of sorts, somewhere between anonymous and not anonymous, that the users can control.  This created a situation in which the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory was tempered by an equally powerful rule which governs real-world interactions: If You’re a Jerk They’ll Hit You in the Face.  This created some sort of Drama-Nexus in MySpace in which people said things they would never say to a person’s face (’cause they’d get hit) but feel the need to regardless (normal person + audience).

Facebook was originally geared towards those attended colleges and strongly encouraged the use of your real name.  It was aimed at a slice of our population which is literate and liked to include your major, location and name.  This swiftly attracted the professional crowd as well.  To top it off, the adolescents using MySpace grew up and moved to a more adult site.  This is sort of the natural evolution of “social networking” sites: to continue to become less anonymous.  It was new and brave back in the day to give up your anonymity, but with Facebook it has become expected.  And it has pushed us further away from the Fuckwad forces and toward something more adult.  It helps that everyone’s family has joined Facebook too, because they usually don’t have to hit you to keep you in line.  The downside to “less anonymous” is that Facebook arguably takes to too far, to the point that your grandma knows every time you toke up.  Dealing with privacy instead of anonymity is growing to be the next major issue we’ll all have to tackle.

The other reason I find Facebook much more interesting than MySpace is that I’m a technically inclined person with a streak of OCD about 2.3″ wide when it comes to computer/network stuff.  I found MySpace’s technology abhorrent.  Their HTML made me cry.  Their site layouts made my face break into spasms.  The designs people put on their pages made my web browser cough up blood.  It just…ugh.  Ew.  Yuck.  No.

Facebook though leverages a lot of technology very well, including nice use of AJAX, clean and simple CSS, and well written PHP in the backend.  They’ve tapped a lot of open-source projects to achieve this, and what I really appreciated is they’ve given back as well, both in small ways and large.  I’m a big open-source geek so it really tickles me to see a company interact well with open-source and contribute to its advancement.  And now they’re allowing me to use their site the way I want to.  Namely by not visiting it =)  That’s covered in the next post.