AdamStovicek.com

I mentioned a short time ago that I was planning to utilize social networking sites more. It began with Last.fm through the enjoyment of the music I listen to periodically. I had some misgivings about the other major sites due to privacy and security concerns, but there was too much intrigue to pass them up completely.

I had originally an account with Myspace [notice I'm not linking to it] that was only used for obtaining pictures of my favorite bands. I never took full advantage of the site by making friends with everyone. I was happy using it for my own needs. After receiving many emails regarding friend requests that nearly all involved some scam to send traffic to either sex or pharmaceutical sites, I had enough. Feeling empowered during Simon Owen’s International Delete Your Myspace Account Day, I mad my request to close the account and life was good.

My membership to Last.fm was in part due to experimenting with the many features that Banshee had to offer. Banshee is to Linux what iTunes is to the Mac, minus the iTunes store. One of the features it had was a plugin to “scrobble” your tunes to an account at Last.fm. This gives you the ability to keep track of music you’ve just played, share them with others, and learn about bands that might appeal to you that you may not have known to exist. You can also join groups and be-friend other users, but with an apparently better class of people than you’d find at Myspace. This you gives other sources of music you can have streamed to your player and enjoy what others are listening to. All around, a win-win scenario.

From there, I joined Twitter. Twitter was founded on the idea of supplying a personal feed to users to share what they were doing through the course of the day. Posting “tweets” throughout the day, your friends could follow your experiences while “tweeting” back to you about what they were doing. The infrastructure has found other uses by coordinating people’s experiences during major events like the recent rampage through the city of Mumbai.

Personally, it was fun for about a week. It’s a novel idea and it has certainly found a niche that many people find useful. I can’t find a need for it that anything else I already use couldn’t perform the same functions. I also don’t need to know what others are doing in real time. If I’m not there to share the experience with them, then they can tell me about it the next time we visit.

Then came Facebook. Oh a whim I gave it a go. I was immediately surprised to find family members that also had accounts there and be-friended them quickly. They introduced me to some of the activities, applications as Facebook calls them, which helped to immerse myself into the Facebook world. However, it weren’t for the applications, I would probably have gotten bored with it soon after joining.

The part of Facebook I find most troubling is how advertisement driven it is. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing. As a matter of fact, it’s great to see a company supplying an entertaining social environment for free and having it fully funded through advertisements. But, a lot of those advertisements are the same annoying ones I find elsewhere. They’ve also engineered a few adverts to seem as though they’re another Facebook application. There was IQ challenge that was making it seem as though a friend had initiated it. After the fifth page of bypassing special offers just for me so I could see my IQ score, I finally gave up leaving the test a bit wiser than before.

So with that, I learned to discern and ignore the advertisements, or at the very least make sure I don’t visit with a browser that doesn’t utilize an ad blocker and/or script blocker. With the said sad ads now blocked, Facebook is much more enjoyable and easier to navigate now that there’s less load on the browser.

So in the end, I still use Last.fm. I’ll find a use for Twitter some day, just not anytime soon. And Facebook has some addictive games to play with friends. I found a lot of other great online games to play, but I’ll save those for another day.

And with that, I place the final nail in this coffin and live on.