You’re Doing it Wrong!

[chrystalline]

A few years ago, I came across Free World Dialup, now known as just FWD, and signed up for a number. Unfortunately, my computer’s mic/speaker system was a bit glitchy, and I couldn’t really rely on it, so I bought an actual phone with a new number already encoded. I never got it to work, apparently due to issues with my router and masking and such. I know a lot more about the router masking and port forwarding now, but the phone got lost in the move back from Los Angeles, so I can’t try again without spending money I don’t have for new hardware. At any rate, I haven’t thought about FWD in a while, and it’s not like I have friends using it anyway, so it was a bit of a surprise to check my email this afternoon and find a message from pulver.com about it.

I followed the link and took a look at the entry, and while it is interesting, I’m afraid I’m not going to give it another try until it’s as easy and inexpensive as an average cell phone, and by inexpensive I mean one with the two year contract that reduces the user’s initial investment. I do use Vonage, which is easy enough, but I’d be much more interested in an inexpensive mobile system. One trades cost for convenience, but if it’s complex enough to stymie someone like me, who is a geek, if only a minor one, then it’s probably not ready for the mainstream audience just yet.

What’s more interesting to me is what I found when I went to the blog’s main page. There are two entries on the subject of Facebook vs. LinkedIn, which apparently is cause for quite a bit of feather-ruffling. Jeff Pulver makes the assertion that Facebook is the place to be in 2007 and that LinkedIn is passé. Comments range from “I agree, making the switch now,” to “I disagree and here’s why,” but Pulver posts his followup asserting that “comments by LinkedIn loyalists are defensive as compared to comments from those who understand and appreciate what it means that Facebook IS now a platform.”

I don’t see that, unless he’s referring to blog posts on other people’s sites. He lists several blogs, but offers no comment on what the blogger is saying. Personally, I’m not inclined to read that many blog entries without an indication of which side of the issue they’re on. Besides which, I find the whole thing seems to boil down to “You’re not using the Internet right!”

He says, “Why use a static site where the fun stops at the profile when there is a wealth of opportunity for vibrant interaction between users and groups of users on Facebook?” Obviously, this is what he sees as the purpose of websites, so for him, this is the way to go. Fine and dandy, but any dogmatic statement that “This is the place to be on the Internet,” is overreaching. I don’t use LinkedIn because it never appealed to me in the first place; it struck me as being very like the short-lived Ringo.com, which died and was reborn as a Photobucket clone. I joined the original Ringo because a friend from a Yahoo Group invited me. There, I met one of her friends, who got me into LiveJournal. LiveJournal was more interesting, because I could have my own soapbox blog and read fanfic and join communities and talk about stuff that interested me. Ringo was not so interesting, because it seemed to be more about posting comments about your contacts than about talking to your contacts. LinkedIn and MySpace and Facebook all fall into this latter category for me, so I don’t really see the fuss. They have communities and groups, but there’s a starkness to the look and feel of the site that makes it less interesting to me than LiveJournal and its spinoffs, though LJ’s current ownership seems determined to move in the direction of Facebook, much to the dismay of a significant percentage of the original LJ population.

My Facebook profile is just there to redirect people to my blog. I don’t hang out there, just as I don’t hang out at MySpace, or Tagged, or Photobucket, or any of the other numerous sites that I’ve joined. To be honest, I don’t really hang out at LJ anymore either, and even my Yahoo Groups have gone mostly unread for months. I use Opera to subscribe to RSS feeds for my preferred sites, most of them being blogs, and catch up on them when I have time. I guess I’m not one of the people for whom his way of using the Internet is the right way.

Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.