A Sequence of Extraordinary Coincidences

A couple of bizarre coincidences have happened to me recently.

One was actually very sad. My mother returned home from work and told me that the mother of a woman she worked with had died the day after Thanksgiving. I told her that a woman I know lost her mother the same day. It turned out that the two women were sisters, hence their mother was one and the same person. I told my mother about my friend and she told me about her coworker, but we had no idea they were related. The coincidence was as strange as well as sad. :-(

There were two brighter coincidences that also occurred in the past week. My mother and I went to a concert, and it turned out that two of my friends were there but we never saw them. One of them saw me, and asked me if the woman who was with me was in fact my mother.

The third one necessitates a little name dropping. As many people who read this blog know, I am friends with well-known high-profile fashion models on Facebook. One of them is noted model Maggie Rizer. Yesterday I posted to my beautiful women picture blog a post paying tribute to Maggie Rizer. Then I found out that Ms. Rizer had just given birth to a baby boy exactly one week earlier, and I wasn't even aware she'd been pregnant. I had only connected to her on Facebook just a couple of weeks earlier, through mutual associations, so I had no idea she was expecting. The reason I posted this blog entry devoted to Maggie Rizer was because - honest to goodness - I'd had this entry saved as a draft for months and I simply decided I'd saved it long enough.

Yes, I congratulated her. After all, she's one of my friends now.

Faceblecch

I connected with a young woman living in New York through MySpace and then later on Facebook. I was interested in meeting her in person but I never got the opportunity. Then, just a few days ago, I noticed she was no longer on my list of Facebook friends, and I thought she must have deleted me. Then I remembered that we had a mutual Facebook friend, and so I checked the mutual friend's Facebook page. Sure enough, she was missing from our mutual friend's list of friends, meaning she had canceled her Facebook account.

I don't blame this woman, whom I won't identify here. Although Facebook was started as an effort for people who knew each in other in person to connect online, it - like so many social networking sites - has grown to allow people who have never met to connect, and people I have never met in person constitute the majority of my Facebook friends. I actually have good, ongoing friendships with some of these people, but there are others I don't communicate with so much. Sometimes I wonder if I should delete them. After all, we wouldn't miss each other.

Many more people are deleting their Facebook accounts and starting new ones, possibly in an effort to get rid of all of their nominal friends while hoping to get their real ones to put in friend requests on their new pages. But I suspect that increasingly has less to do with it. Facebook was recently found to be spreading private information through its game applications, and all of the mechanisms intended to preserve something resembling privacy are difficult if not impossible for anyone who isn't an absolute computer geek to implement them on their own pages.

Facebook is becoming unreliable in other ways. There was another Facebook outage yesterday afternoon, lasting an hour. Some icons don't show up on the profile pages the way they should, and I found it impossible to add pictures to a Volkswagen fan page I like. Of course, my "likes" are collected to send me advertising Facebook thinks might appeal to me. I have a small monitor and I have to scroll to the right to see my ads. Mostly, I ignore them. But if this issue and the other issues I've already cited are affecting enough people, Faceboook will seem more painful than pleasurable. That is, until Mark Zuckerberg can fix the bugs in the system and find new methods to ensure privacy that we don't need Windows For Dummies to follow.

And if he doesn't act on either of these things, Facebook may very well be replaced by something else, just as Facebook replaced MySpace as the world's favorite networking site.

I hope I find that woman on Facebook again. If not, I hope she has a good life. :-)

Social Media News

A business story in my local newspaper yesterday reported that Facebook has overtaken MySpace in the number of users for the first time since it was founded five years ago. Facebook users totaled 70,280,000 in May; MySpace users totaled 70,250,000.

Perhaps this was not unexpected. MySpace has grown increasingly stodgy, while Facebook offers more interactive features that allows people to interact more freely. That is, when it works. (I've had my problems with Facebook, but as of now I can say that they've since been fixed for good.)

While Facebook offers immediate information and easier interaction for its users, MySpace tried to offer more entertainment content - music downloads, movie previews - that people simply didn't care about. Right now there's a trailer for Sandra Bullock's latest movie, and while I like Sandra Bullock (and will probably like The Proposal, if I get around to seeing it), that's not what I go to social networking sites for. I go to them to communicate with my friends.

That's why I go to Facebook more than anywhere else. I can spend up to thirty minutes at a time there; I'm on MySpace for only a couple of minutes at a time. Most of the people I know in my writers' group are there; by contrast, only one of them is a MySpace friend, and I haven't heard from her in months. (This friend also has a Facebook account.) Several other MySpace friends haven't visited their own sites for weeks, sometimes months; they're too busy congregating on Facebook because it's easier. I communicate with friends of mine with both MySpace and Facebook accounts more often on Facebook, which more people take more seriously.

As for MySpace, no one seems to take that seriously anymore. Statuses and moods haven't been updated on many of my friends's pages for months. Statuses on Facebook, by the way, disappear after a week. Someone who says he's happy on MySpace - because that's what he wrote in March - might be miserable now. If he hasn't updated his Facebook page in over a week, you have no idea how he is.

Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation bought MySpace in 2006 and was hailed as a visionary for getting a piece of the Internet social networking action - now looks like a square who can't keep up with the times. Murdoch has vowed to get MySpace - which had to lay off a third of its 1200 or so employees - back on top, but that objective is in doubt. In the brief history of Internet social networking sites, such sites tend to be forgotten once they lose momentum. Friendster, for example, is like a bland sitcom that's been on the air for a decade; no one knows it's there. As I previously noted, I know a married couple who met through Friendster, and they're grateful to it for having found each other. But a married couple having met through Friendster sounds as hip these days as a married couple having met through a Catholic Youth Organization dance.

MySpace may not go the way of CYO dances, but just the fact that they're capable of going the way of Friendster must be frightening to Murdoch and to Tom Anderson, a co-founder of MySpace who immediately becomes your first friend when you sign on. (That might be another reason MySpace is in trouble; becoming friends with one of its leaders automatically might seem creepy to some.) Social networking sites tend to have their moments in the sun, but the ones that succeed stay ahead of the curve. Those that don't do so lose their edge with little hope of regaining it. That's just as true in other businesses - look at all the American and European auto companies still reeling from loss of market share to the Japanese. And, just as GM never quite regained an advantage over Toyota, the evidence of history suggests that MySpace isn't likely to get back its edge over Facebook.

Nevertheless, I plan to keep my MySpace page. Its format is like that of a real Web site, and I use it to promote myself to the outside world; my Facebook page is private. Plus, I love putting up a new music video on my MySpace page every week for people to see; the only way you can keep something up on a Facebook page for a week or longer is to not post anything for awhile. (I inform people of my latest MySpace "Music Video Of the Week" through - you guessed it - Facebook.) These small features might just keep MySpace in the running, if only as an also-ran.

Unlike Friendster, which is just plain out of contention.

Trojan Horses

Are social networking sites overrated?

Forget the horror stories about people who got involved with MySpace or Craigslist. Episodes of that nature have gone on in one way or another for years, mostly without help from the Internet. Leaving the tales of the dangers of social networking sites aside for the sake of this post, I ask this - are social networking sites all that wonderful?

I've met a couple of people through the Internet - I met one friend through Flickr, in fact, if Flickr counts as a social networking site - but most of the people I connect with through MySpace or Facebook are folks I know in the real, non-cyberspace world. I prefer the actual company of people rather than the virtual one - that's why I made the eleven MySpace friends of mine that I have met and know in person my top eleven friends. More often than not, social networking sites are sites for me to go to in order to keep up my "real world" friendships.

I've tried meeting new people through MySpace, for example, but it doesn't usually work out. Case in point: One of my MySpace friends celebrated her birthday this past Monday. I had been trying to meet this woman in person for some time, because she sounds interesting. Anyway, I seized the occasion of her birthday to leave her a comment on her page wishing her a happy birthday, as a friendly gesture. But, because all comments left on this woman's page requires her approval before they're added to her comments page, it wouldn't appear until she looked at it and approved it.

It hasn't appeared at all. She has logged in to her MySpace page since Monday, but she didn't bother to post the comment I left her.

Come to think of it, she rarely approves any of the comments I've left for her photos as well.

So, I tried to meet someone and be nice and friendly and all that, and it didn't happen.

Oh yeah, I have 67 MySpace friends at this posting, and I'm in regular contact with no more than a few of them at a time. There are some MySpace "friends" I am in no contact with at all.

So, given all that, why do I have so many MySpace friends, especially when most of them are friends in name only?

I'm seriously considering dropping a lot of my MySpace friends (including the woman I just mentioned) for the same reason General Motors dropped so many brands - they're superfluous. If I want to meet anyone that badly, I'll do it the old-fashioned way - go to a bar. As for my MySpace page, well, it makes a good personal Web site, and I enjoy posting a different music video on it each week.

More of my Facebook friends, by contrast, are people I know in the real world, so that works out better, especially now that all of the bugs that affected my Facebook screen - part of it was truncated - have been worked out. I don't know about Friendster, though; I tried opening mail on that site and a Trojan virus hijacked my PC and it took me all afternoon to remove it.

Ironically, the chap who introduced me to Friendster met his wife through it.

Me, I get a Trojan from it.

And don't even get me started on Twitter, which I rarely use.