Thing 21: Beyond MySpace

This is what I really like about the concept of social networking sites. The Internet makes the world seem both smaller and larger: you can be a lonely geek in your little corner of the world, but via the Internet, find a whole bunch of similarly geeky folk to share with. That's an amazing thing, and very exciting. It takes the old idea of pen-pals and makes it much more immediate and exciting. You find others like yourself and discover the extraordinary breadth and diversity of people, places, cultures... that's so very cool.

I liked the look of Gather and Ning, and I also wandered around Bake Space for a while. I also played with google briefly and found Schmooze, a Jewish social network; Citizen Scientist for the layperson with a lot of curiosity, Maccaca, an online Digital Museum of Art for artists, and so much more.

So yes, I'll spend more time looking through these sites. I'd also like to find a way to let patrons know about these sites -- it seems that MySpace and Facebook get all the press, but they are so oppressively glitzy and teen oriented. It's nice to know that there are options for people who don't want that.

One note: I was watching a little bit of snowboarding on television yesterday, and between runs they were interviewing a couple of the "star" snowboarders. The interviews were not what I would have expected, instead they were right out of the MySpace "Coke or Pepsi?" survey. Sort of a media mashup. But it's alright for snowboarding, I guess, though I will be really scared if interviews start looking like this on the nightly news.