Lost!

Among friends and family, many know and understand why I don’t have Facebook and MySpace profiles. So, with every fifth post on DIGG, TechCrunch and other sites talking about Facebook, I’m really wondering why we need “social networks” in the first place. Even Google is getting into the forray tomorrow with the launch of OpenSocial (Supposed URL will go live tomorrow). What was life like without all these social networks? Who are the primary users of social networks?

My Profiles
When you search Google for my full name, it pops up a blog that I use to run. Oddly, I never used my last name on this blog, but Google has linked it to me (things that make you go hmm). But, if you scroll down a little, you’ll find that I only have 2 profiles on other websites: Linked In and Classmates.com - I abandoned both awhile back.

I even flat out ignore invitation requests to other websites like Facebook. If it’s that important and that life changing, I’d already have one.

MySpace & Facebook
I don’t have a MySpace profile mainly for several reasons, but mainly it boils down to how the damn thing looks. Why do I need to use something that usually ends up looking like a 2 year old created it with a marker? I also cannot stand all the graphics people throw around. I absolutely cannot stand people embedding music into their pages either. I usually spend about 3 minutes on MySpace a year.

As for Facebook, I’ve seen it, but past that, I won’t use it. Why should I post my life on yet another website?

Security
It’s already started happening. Hell, I do it. Security is a big issue with most Social Networks. I say this because most people post Journal type entries in their “blog”. They also post life events in the comments. That can be tracked people. If your son posts that you’re doing drugs, as a future employer seeing that - I wouldn’t hire you - period.

We’ve all done it. We’ll search Google and other search engines for information on others. Whether it’s a possible date, a future employer/employee, or an old friend, we’re curious about whats happening. If I have an interview with someone and I find out that they can’t stand certain things, I’m going to do my best not to talk about those things.

In The News
Facebook has been in the news over and over again, mostly because of Microsoft’s investment. Soon after, some brainiac came out and said Facebook was valued at $15B and instantly, the story was picked up across the internet. So tell me how a company, that survives on Ads and just got a $240M infusion (for 1.6% people!) is instantly worth $15B? Because Microsoft was smoking crack when they paid that much for so little of the company. Lets not forget that Facebook was valued at $550M in 2006 after Greylock Partners, of San Mateo paid $25M for what, I’m going to guess, is a 30% share of the company (No proof, but thats the figure most first rounds like). Lets just say Greylock is doing their best Montgomery Burns impression while thinking about all the money they’re going to get.

In the Future
I really don’t see things like MySpace and Facebook lasting more than a few more years. Wait until someone decides to implement OpenID in a few major blogging packages and you’ll have an internet wide application with one login - similar to the comments system I’m using now. More customization, faster response times, and a larger audience. 4 years at the most and the Social Network, as we know it, will be gone.

If you’re viewing through RSS, you might want to click on this story. I’ve updated Lost to include a new Web 2.0 comment system so that you can register in one place and comment anywhere it’s installed. It’s a new system called Intense Debate. On top of the 1 registration to control them all feature, there are several others as well. Your profile allows you to show several other profiles (Facebook, MySpace, etc), has a comment rating system built in (reputation/comment vote), an RSS feed for your comments and a heck of a lot more.

At this time, Intense Debate natively supports several blogging systems and several others through a javascript snippet. If you’re running WordPress from your own site, it’s the same as the WordPress.org button, otherwise you’ll have to manually place your javascript snippet instead of installing a plugin - not fun. For native support, you insert your blog details and it gives you a file to download. For WP, it was one PHP file that installed as a normal plugin. After that, I had to go to my blog options, hit Import and let it run for a few minutes. While it was running, their system started emailing me on comments that needed to be moderated - odd because it marked all my comments for moderation even though it wasn’t supposed to.

While installing and such, their site was a tad slow. From what I’m seeing in my mailbox, they’re getting hit with people installing the service, so things should start to pick up soon.

Registration is pretty easy if you’re just registering for a profile. Other than that, it’s the standard test and retest of getting your old comments exported and tweaking the system to do what you want.

Anyway, you can see the newer comment list on the sidebar and the newer comment section below. I’m sure it’ll update over the next few days since it’s listed as “Beta-ish”.

Problems that I see right now:

• No incoming link tracking (Trackbacks). The amount of comments that didn’t show up at first worried me until I found out it was all Trackbacks.
• The ability to limit the last X posts in the sidebar. Right now it’s 10 comments and wowzers, if they don’t change it, I may need to pull the widget or change themes to a double sidebar.
• UI Issues with text over an image.

I use to pride myself on being up to date, but lately, I’ve started noticing more and more that I don’t really “surf” anymore. I tend to stay on specific sites or inside my RSS feeds. Well, today, I learned about PlentyOfFish.com. For those that don’t know, it’s a free dating site. Whats interesting is that the site creator was pretty much the single employee, single coder, single everything until very recently when he hired his second employee. It gets really interesting to know how he started the site.

Markus Frind (Blog) started out in the Web bubble bust by deciding to switch from ASP to ASP.Net while hopping jobs during the downturn of the bubble. He would code in the evening since he’s more of a “learn as I go” programmer (like myself) and started hosting from his home computer and internet connection. After he saturated his DSL line, he decided to upgrade and thats the crazy part. Around this time, AdSense rolled out and he started making a few thousand dollars a month. Today, he’s making around $30,000 a day in Ad revenue from Google’s AdSense. Continue reading…

I’ve never, ever, covered a game on my blog. I don’t even own an XBox, but something happened today. I was over at a friends house and we beat Halo together and we started talking at the end of the game. Next thing we know, theres one last scene after the credits. All those people that know about this scene - good for you. For all the other crackheads screaming that Master Chief is dead - might want to actually watch all the way through the credits.

There - my first and possibly last gaming related post. Be gone with ya.