My thoughts on other people’s thoughts

Saxby’s Fifth Avenue offered delightful insight into the difference between MySpace and Facebook. I, too, noticed that with MySpace many of the messages I received were at best seedy and at worst porn promotion. However, I still have an inordinate amount of real friends from the old days that are on that site but not on Facebook. I migrated; they didn’t. Does that mean we’re not friends anymore?

Ideally, I’d still be able to call them all or send them all e-mail every once in a while, but we set up social networks so we don’t have to do things like that.

Some of my MySpace friends (keep in mind, I’m still referring to people I actually know but that I keep in contact with via MySpace) have told me I sold out by moving to a more popular site. CMKDimples and Jennyfromthefarm address that idea of social order among online society. Like Jenny, I would hate to see the online world become about cliques, but I think that our small brains demand order to be made of the things that we do. So like it or not, a pecking order will probably form online.

It will most likely impact sites that focus on professional growth, too. For that, the heirarchy can be extremely useful…as long as a person is aware it exists and uses that knowledge to his or her advantage.

Learning about life online

I’m amazed at the disparate and seemingly random sites available online. As we were flipping through some of the sites that provide new online capabilities in class last week, I was a bit overwhelmed by my options. Actually, I was a lot overwhelmed.

One thing I instantly recognized was the utility the sites provide should one decide to wade through some of them. Since the class assignment was to wade, I did. And I’m so glad.

My favorite site was bookmooch.com — for completely selfish reasons. I love to read, and although the site is something like a library that you actually have to pay shipping and handling charges to access, I can do it from the comfort of my big, cozy chair. Lovely.

I thought I would love the site StumbleUpon.com, but trying to sign up in order to take advantage of their search capabilities proved frustrating. I gave them my personal info, and then I was asked to enter my e-mail address and password to search for contacts on their site. After giving up that password info — something I don’t particularly care about, but still… — I was told none of my contacts are on the site. Then it didn’t let me proceed further. If the site is that exclusive, how will the people in my sphere ever get in?

For those of you who’ve been keeping up with my blog (laughing to myself right now), you know that I’m a Twitter.com person now. I’m still not using it as much as some (Garret and Kristen are great at it), but I must say, I enjoy the updates.

Finally, I love Facebook.com/ads. In fact, I have already shared it with a friend of mine who is in marketing now. We have had multiple conversations about micro targeting. Facebook can make it so easy to test a micro targeting strategy. If it works for a nominal fee on Facebook, it might also work on a larger scale. That’s a really exciting innovation.