How can I miss you if you won’t go away?
When I first started wandering around the Net at 1200 baud, it was a solitary experience. As I gophered my way through distant labs and libraries, I could almost hear my footsteps echo through the shelves and stacks. No company. No distractions. If you really wanted interaction, there was IRC, but otherwise, you could socialize in relaxed deferred time on the message boards. Then came instant messaging, and we were never really alone again.
Now it’s practically a given that your time online is social time. Between commercial and peer pressure, you’re expected to maintain both a public presence for general interaction and a semi-private sphere for friends and family, both updated in real time with your activities, opinions, latest interests, location, and cultural tastes. The vehicles for this presence were homepages at first, then blogs, and now the widget-laden profiles on the social networking sites, along with an endless flow of pinging, poking and tweeting. It’s sort of funny that a system built by notoriously socially awkward geeks has turned into a mammoth, never-ending cocktail party. But that’s where we are, and right now, billions are being bet on monetizing the world of constant acquaintanceship.
After watching sites like MySpace and Facebook thrive while their own efforts foundered, Google and Yahoo are apparently doing some reevaluation, and according to Saul Hansell at the NYT, have realized that in the address books of all their e-mail customers, they already have the makings of a social networking site. Hansell’s sources say the companies are looking at adding social features to your e-mail inbox and personalized home page (iGoogle or MyYahoo). Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse says we might see systems that determine the strength of your various relationships based on frequency and type of communication and then present your incoming e-mail with that in mind. “The inbox you have today is based on what people send you, not what you want to see,” Garlinghouse said. “We can say, here are the messages from the people you care about most.”
Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/WriteWeb thinks there’s something to this. “The social network of the future will be populated by the RSS feeds of the activities of your friends and your friends will be determined by e-mail. The big players won’t put a major push into building a new social network,” he writes. “Your e-mail account isn’t valuable because it’s got the e-mail addresses of other people who could be solicited commercially — it’s valuable because it articulates who in the world is able to command your attention. It contains analyzable, direct communication between you and the people most important to you.” And Larry Dignan at ZDNet wonders what the future looks like for any but the biggest social networking specialty sites: “Increasingly, social networking is looking like a feature more than a business. There will be big ramifications to consider as social networking becomes integrated into your everyday applications.”
And what about the lone wolves among us who treasure our private travels? It’s a future of late-night log-ons, with stealth cloaking on and running lights off, slipping out into the dark of the Net to explore undisturbed.
That last paragraph took the cake
yuck just what I need; another excuse for yahoo to get on my computer without permission and mess around with how I’ve got my system running. they’ve already fixed it so I can’t get downloads on my software.(which cost me over $700) but AT&T told me I’m stuck with working it out. but as soon as the contract is up at&t can take a flying ?! and take yahoo with them. and turns out google isn’t any smarter. if you took google yahoo and microsoft, rolled them up in silly putty, the whole smear would just be a bunch of sleaze ball technical thieves. cheap ones at that/
Vintage John Murrell and a piece I have saved to reflect on. Bronfman’s too, though I rather hate him for cutting funding to the Waterloo Ontario Seagram’s Distillery Museum, which was an award winning part of his patrimony. For which the moron would give no mony! when he got the key of the car. Still being the source of their billions. Peter
Ha! 1200 baud to me was really, really fast - since I started out using the pre-web ArpaNet at 300 baud dialup. And, the dialup was from San Diego to a “TIP” located at ISI at USC in Los Angeles! Never had a better text editor than the one ISI ran on what I think was a DEC PDP-20, even with the slow round trip.
WRT all this stuff with social networking etc, no one in my old age group would even consider any such exposure in a public forum. Why do all you young folk find it necessary and desireable to fill the Internet Tubes with this trivia? And I cannot imagine that any Boss would want to constantly be in touch with all his minions unless he has little to do besides tire his wrists with all the incessant typing needde to “keep in touch”.
C’mon, lighten up you gals and guys, otherwise it is early serious sickness and an early death if you don’t get off your collective duffs and get outside and do some hard physical labor around the house ( and don’t tell me about the “gym” - that ain’t the same!)
As they used to say on the Lower East Side in NYC ‘Mazeltov”.
Avi P.
“And what about the lone wolves among us who treasure our private travels? It’s a future of late-night log-ons, with stealth cloaking on and running lights off, slipping out into the dark of the Net to explore undisturbed.”
We’ll have to find some kind of weird anonymous place in 2nd Life to congregate, like a William Gibson bar in eastern Europe or Tokyo.
“Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/WriteWeb thinks there’s something to this.”
Yes, it’s called Twine. Without semantic processing, there will be way too much noise, way too little signal.
“and your friends will be determined by e-mail.”
Are you people mad? What the f%&K. As Avi said, get a life. Real friends are people you see, touch, talk with, etc.
This recently improved electronically typewriter cannot replace love.
An interesting title to the article: “How can I miss you if you won’t go away?” This was the title of a song by Dan Hick and His Hot Licks, released about 1970. A fun song.
Like Avi, I started with a 300 baud modem — mine was an acoustic coupler, with foam cups which held the two ends of a standard A.T.&T. telephone handset to send and receive the ASCII modulated tones.
I was using the pre-web Tymnet, which multiplexed up to 128 users on one long-distance telephone line. It was not fast. I was just a remote user of one of Tymshare’s timesharing computers (the only technology available for those who couldn’t justify owning a computer, which was usually a main-frame.)
I, too, used IRC a little. It was so slow that I didn’t find it very worth my time. Mostly I just worked on Tymshare’s PDP-10s. They had one of the first full screen editors, EMACS (Editing MACroS for the Dec line editor.) Those MIT students were very innovative.
**Applause**
This is great writing John. Thank you.
Nool
Bless you for keeping the Dan Hicks flame alive for another day. A very nice updated version of the song on Dan’s 2001 album Beatin’ The Heat (No associate marketing tag, I promise.)
Obviously none of you remember the rich debaucheries at 1200 baud represented by Tiny Sex at mit.edu.
How could it get any better than that?