The Social Web We Weave

Two in one day? Yikes. I must be feeling better.

Back in the day when "social web" meant "MySpace" I avoided it like the plague. I've gone to school, got a degree in web design and e-commerce (just in time for the bubble to burst) and MySpace was the anti-thesis of any kind of coherent web design. Craptastic backgrounds, annoying animations, unreadable text, pages that didn't scale so you had to side-scroll because of some big-ass image the user posted. Don't get me started on the music that would start blasting. (thanks for sharing, where's the pause button?) MySpace was just horrible on all counts.
Others followed. Classmates.com, Facebook, Twitter.... Suddenly, "The Social Web" was really taking off and everybody was doing it. I begrudgingly started to dip my toes in, mainly because I was searching for some old high school friends. The ones I didn't find on MySpace (gag) found me on Facebook. I'm still not real big on either of those sites, but I pop in from time to time just to keep in touch.
Twitter, on the other hand, has me hooked. It's not just Twitter, its all the mash-ups that go with it. twitpic.com, 12seconds.tv, blip.fm - they all help complete the experience. Twitter by itself is kind of an exercise in patience. First off, there's the spam. You get followers that want to tell you how to get whiter teeth. You get followers that want to help you get laid in your own home town. You get followers that want to send you to their "naughty" pics. Then you get followers that want to tell you how you can make money on Twitter by being a spammer. (Tip number one, present yourself as a female and include a picture of a cute girl. no kidding.) Twitter by itself tends to turn into a pissing contest as to who has the most "followers." People will follow you at random, thinking that you will return the favor and help boost their count. I don't auto-follow anybody. First, I make sure you're not a spam-bot of some sort. Then I check your tweet history. Some people have nothing better to do than tweet every 2 minutes. Sorry, but if I log into Twitter and I see nothing but 3 pages of YOUR tweets, I'm unfollowing you just as fast as I can get to that button. If you're doing nothing but tweeting links to stories from digg.com or fark.com, I already have those sites open, so goodbye. If you have nothing but your own agenda in mind and won't take the time to reply to a message I sent to you, then we're done.
Of course there is a lot of intolerance out there too. Recently, I had been following (and had been followed by) a woman and her brother. I never really knew the brother very well, but, I'll call her "Blondie" and I talked quite often. It wasn't anything other than innocent chat between a couple of people that had some things in common. Then one day I dared to make a tweet that exposed my more-centrist-than-liberal Democratic viewpoint. The brother tweeted me and told me that I was a "FUCKING MORON!" and had unfollowed me within an hour. About a week or so later, I realized that "Blondie" wasn't replying to me at all... I asked her what was up and she eventually got around to telling me that her husband didn't want her messaging other men, that "she is married." Well duh. I knew that already and as I said earlier, our conversations were nothing but innocent. I figured she (as a full-on right-wing, red-state, Glen Beck following) Republican didn't want to associate with me anymore. That had to be it because her husband's wishes sure weren't keeping her from talking with the other men who were following her. Whatever. Life's too short. I waved goodbye in a tweet and pulled the plug.

But then, there are some good people that come along. Recently, I met someone named loripop326 on blip.fm. She's refreshing to say the least. Someone else who believes that Twitter is a place to play and actually interact with other people. I started reading her blog (shesawake.blogspot.com) and others that she follows, and that got my writing bug started again. She's fun, she's honest, she's not judgmental. Ok, she's judgmental but she's fun and honest about it. Through her, I am starting to meet other people who want to have fun and actually socialize on Twitter. I've only got about 60 followers on Twitter and most of them are strictly informational. Others are just part of the constant, random stream of consciousness that is Twitter. Because of her, I have actually started to make friends on Twitter, (hi drdon911) and started losing some of the cynicism that was creeping up about the service. For that, Lori is teh awesome. (Even though she's Canadian. LOL) Thank you Lori.

Now if I could just get a couple more followers here. LOL