Socialist

I’ve been involved in social networks, social media or whatever you call it for the best part of 10 years now, which is actually quite scary in some aspects. It’s more funny how in those 10 years public sentiment has changed from one of trepidation to embracement, it was only 9 years ago I went to New York City to spend Labor Day weekend with a whole bunch of people I met on the old SixDegrees site. Back then there was kind of a stigma about it, you know, “you met people on the internet?” Now I can safely say I met my wife on the internet, and all my friends in Atlanta? All off the internet too, all without scorn or ridicule. It’s just part of everyday life now.

Why, it was only Friday night I had drinks and dinner with friends at The Brick Store in Decatur and part of the conversation was WordPress 2.5, and who was upgrading to it, everyone who could updated their Facebook status to say they were indeed at the Brick Store and one of the parting comments at the end of the night was “see you on twitter.” Twitter is currently my social network of choice, mainly because I’ve been twittering for so long:

I was only the 5,628th person to join Twitter, my first update was the 27,416th tweet in Twitter history. A little over 18 months later there are countless millions of members and my latest tweet is the 776,485,029th. There’s something about being there near the beginning, like Flickr users who were part of Ludicorp’s Game Neverending, it’s that hierarchy of geekdom (not to be confused with the hierarchy of gamerdom that is a baptism of fire in the form of kids yelling and cursing at you) we wear it like a badge.

Like my early social networking exploits, who can say they scored free swag from a startup who literally force fed them beer from a fish tank/cooler in their head office in New York, well around 30 of us out of a member base of over 3 million. Nothing can take that away. And those people haven’t quite disappeared neither, all it takes is an email to the old Topica mailing list and boom, nostalgia city. I think a 10 year reunion is in order next year.

But I digress, nearly everything is social networking/media nowadays, everything is RSS feeds and it’s making me somewhat lazy. I rarely visit blogs anymore as Google Reader keeps everything in order for me. I rarely blog as I’d rather update my Twitter/Facebook status. I rarely take pictures now as my phone has a semi-decent camera, and it’s always on me and I can quickly upload it to Flickr. It’s been a slow but significant shift for the last year or so. And it can all be aggregated on my Lifestream or FriendFeed, so you don’t even need to visit here anymore, it’s not worth it.

Embrace the socialism, reject the individualism.