I can’t decide whether its a good or bad thing to have closed networks. Maybe if we had more open or universal ones we could communicate on different sites without having to sign up and create new profiles all the time. It does seem to slow down the process and deter people from using more than a few different sites.

Ever time I fill in a registration form I get more conscious how much personal information I’m putting out there and whether it can be manipulated for someone else’s’ benefit. Maybe this is a good thing though as it makes us more careful, as privacy is always going to be an issue.

On the plus side of closed networks and possibly why the trend is moving towards niche network sites is because people want to feel they belong and having a closed group of people with similar interests creates a sense of community and a group identity that we want to associate ourselves with.

Speculation over facebook’s drop in popularity I would have thought to be due to its decision to open up to the general public, eliminating its exclusivity to students which I think had damaged its cool factor and has increased the take up of applications due to the different type of people who participate on these networks.

The whole of society works on the basis of the in and out groups. Those who are in have power and superiority over those they don’t let in but they have to let enough people in for it to be seen as a desirable and well known group. Therefore I think trends will always switch between open and closed areas to keep the balance right.

At http://facevaluebook.blogspot.com/ I discuss more issues about the new buzz word that is social networking and its use as a marketing tool

Throughout our history as humans, and especially more recently, to borrow your idea in the Wallpaper podgram, we have been uglifying our surroundings, churning out more and more crap. Personally, I think Facebook and, in particular, the comments and ratings system on YouTube are symptoms of this eternal trend.

The internet is vast, and the internet, on the whole, has life-changing material within it; it is a wealth of information so vast and so varied that one could quite happily waste multiple lifetimes absorbing it. The problem I find, in my limited teenage experience, is that we have to sift through so much garbage to find things of worth on any user-generated forum/site that it quickly becomes tedious and unpleasant. There is a plethora of wasted verbiage on YouTube, trillions upon trillions of spewings of people confirming their existence to a global community that doesn’t really care, and yet actually saying the square root of bugger all.

Granted, one may argue that worth is subjective, and also one may argue that, since previous comments have already expressed this, this comment is just a crushed cup on a Staten Island of internet garbage, but I guess that’s not something we’re going to solve in any great hurry.

It tends to breed cynicism in me, which I guess may be why I am a little too hasty to condemn things as pointless (I refuse to upgrade my mobile phone as it meets my requirements and any extra features will just help to add to my own personal rubbish dump, as well as wasting my life away)

Sorry for such a long and stilted rant, teenagers to speak their mind even when it’s complete drivel, it gives us something to post on Facebook.

Regards

Claire

P.S. Stephen, in case you actually read this ever, your facial expressions throughout Jeeves and Wooster are quite out of this world.

However I think social networking is changing the way and the scope of our communication. I blogged about that in detail here: http://www.onepostperday.com/?p=224

The gist is that social networking provides us with contacts we call friends but are in fact assets that have something we might be able to use. Sounds more cynical than it maybe is.

http://xkcd.com/256/

Overjoyed to see you back on the net, Stephen (thank Cory at BoingBoing for hipping me to your blog). Been to Idaho yet? It has three capitals, you know…

People have a need to belong to certain groups and demographics, and a fully open network like myspace just doesn’t cut it for some, so a progression towards closed niches was bound to happen.

Web 2.0 hardly has any meaning any more, since just about any site worth mentioning has adopted the principles of social collaboration, widgets and user-generated content.

Social networking is becoming a must-have feature for any site, so we might as well drop the “2.0″ and call it “Web”.

http://www.pijoo.com/#yorkshireblogger

Everyone had a site on Geocities or Angelfire or what have you–so many sites out there that were titled “Welcome to my corner of the web! ” and plastered with animated gifs, but otherwise lacked any real content.

MySpace and Facebook are basically searchable versions of 1997’s Geocities. It’s not content–it’s a presence, more or less. “I’m here, I don’t have anything interesting to say to the world, but talk to me!” Things haven’t really changed that much.

I hope i can get true you’re spam filer so i can say that you have a great blog and thank you for the link back, greets….