yulek's Journal: socialnets

a short opinion of SNs:

friendster - first successful attempt at a socnet; basically a virtual meat market; i think its popularity is fueled mostly by people's need to be connected to beautiful people. i know that's all i got out of it (my beautiful people are more beautiful than your beautiful people)

it's a "shallow" net... kind of like the AOL of SNs >:)

also, it's mind-boggingly slow.

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tribe.net - many many more features than friendster and built around the idea of clubs (tribes), seems to be a hangout for artists and freakos and much less of a meat market; there's much more to life than just getting laid!

technologically the most advanced and very little downtimes. RSS feeds for every public tribe makes it much easier to communicate by using aggregators.

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orkut.com - certainly has the most ego boosting features, reached critical mass unbelievably fast (could it be the nebuleous 'affiliated with google' thing?), seems much more a geek-crowd than friendster or tribe (could have to do with that ego-boosting bit?).

has one tiny little problem... constantly losing data. i have 3 friends who just disappeared one day and then a few weeks ago it happened to me too. no reason. i'm just gone. the communities i've started are now orphaned. my friends say it's like i never existed. i actually emailed their "customer support" (i'm guessing it's aliased to /dev/null 'cause i never got any responses to 4 different querries)

i eventually returned to orkut. it's impossible to stay away when half your friends are there... but it still amazes me how much the engine sucks. bugs bugs bugs. broken threads. shitty performance. awful forum design...

MY OPINION:
tribe.net > orkut > friendster

tribe.net has the best design for a non-dating SN, and the community is the most interesting. i've actually learned a ton, signed up for cool classes, had amazing conversation threads, and it wasn't just a front for meeting people i'd like to fuck... rockin'