In Your Facebook

A year ago, we were besieged by MySpace. It seemed like every kid wanted a MySpace page. Most of these MySpacers had the artistic talent of a hyperactive monkey in a room of paint-filled balloons. The resulting backgrounds were garish. Entering the page caused tunes to play, and you had to hunt around to turn the damn thing off. But it made it easy for kids to write a webpage. Unlike, say, Livejournal, it didn't have to be about blogging. It emphasized getting your friends to declare you as a friend. All the kind of high school popularism that infects who desperately crave this faux attention and care, treating friendships like merit badges. The neediest guy of all being founder Tom Anderson. At one point, everyone, by default, had Tom as a friend.

Did I also mention that MySpace is ugly?

The "grown-up" counterpart to MySpace is Facebook. Now, for a while, you couldn't easily get a Facebook account. It really was aimed at college students, and you were supposed to be invited, or something, to enter a Facebook network. Eventually, they let high school students create accounts, then everyone.

Everyone seems to say Facebook is a far cleaner version of MySpace, but it's become something of a social networking Web 2.0 darling. Check out TechMeme today and you'll find several articles about Facebook, most likely (I haven't fully checked it out) because you can write plug-ins for Facebook, and this has lead geekdom to do so.

Now, you might think that having a site that permits plugins is awfully geeky. Who would ever use such a thing? But here's the key: you don't need that many people to write plugins. A few is enough, and it allows the geeky part of the community to contribute to this online community.

Of course, I'm plenty late to the Facebook phenomenon. Heck, I'm still writing on Blogger! But I like to point this out to people even more lost about the trends.

Over time, I figure that's what I want to do. Check out trends and write about them. Normally, by the time I notice, it's already a trend. After all, you have to see it a lot, and by then, you know it's too late.

Even so, it's a good record for me to note it down.