Honestly, when I here one of the talking heads on CNN asking me to following him on twitter, I just want to throw everything within reach to the screen. Fortunately, I own an old 150 pounds TV, sturdy enough to survive my bursts of frustration.
As always, when something cool comes up, it becomes overblown and put on a pedestal like it’s the best thing that happened in the past one hundred years.
Remember MySpace? Today I bet well other 90% of all web pages on MySpace are digital ghosts that are accumulating dust. The result: a pile of junk that no one cares about bought by Rupert Murdoch for $500 million in 2005, thinking it would be a gushing cash investment. Unfortunately for him, that’s about when Facebook became popular. Almost instantly, MySpace wasn’t that cool anymore and soon a good chunk of MySpace users switched to Facebook.
Then came Tweeter…
And the sky opened, finally we had a tool that would connect us to the world without even having to put in any effort. The 140 characters limit is great for those who don’t like to spend time typing too much. Suddenly, we would know what Britney Spears had for breakfast and how Ashton Kutcher’s plane was 30 minutes late and it pissed him off.
Now what about YouTube? Well I actually been visiting YouTube quite a bit. Of course the vast majority of the content is useless and mind numbing, kind of like cable TV, but you can always find something interesting because of the huge amount of data, which by the way is starting to become an issue for Google (They bought YouTube for $1.6 billion in 2006). Apparently they have to supply more and more hardware to maintain the site because of the size of the data being uploaded to it, and they have trouble generating advertising revenue. But it’s OK, they can afford to loose a few millions, the big picture is that YouTube place Google in the right position for the future of the Internet, when storage won’t matter and everyone will have a video recording device in their pocket.
Don’t get me wrong, social network tools can be very useful in helping people who actually know each other stay in touch. But personally, I hardly use any of them. Maybe because I like to keep my private life… well… private. And I also like the old fashion ways of staying in touch better, like using a phone or even better, actually physically meeting people in real life.
Tags: facebook, myspace, social network, tweeter, youtube