reviewsnthoughts

Although as a writer I’ve “done” many types of articles, essays, or even short stories, for the past six years I’ve been an online reviewer at such sites as Amazon, Epinions, Viewpoints, and even Barnes & Noble.   This is partly because reviews and opinions columns were my forte when I was studying journalism between 1980 and 1989. and partly because while I can still write long articles about, say, the 2008 Presidential campaign or the death and rebirth of classical music in the South Florida radio market and get paid for them, it is sometimes a bit more fun - if often challenging - to think of a product, service, or piece of entertainment and write a consumer’s-eye review on it.  I suppose it sounds like it’s “easier” or “less lucrative” than writing more demanding stuff - a novel, say, or a memoir - but the process of writing a good review - whether it’s about a great movie or a lousy web site - demands a fine balance between accurate reporting, artful use of wordplay, and trying to use persuasive writing to at least give a reader a witty (or at least informative) rave or pan that tries sway him or her without insulting his or her intelligence.

I have, as of late, gotten into a rut of doing reviews on Star Wars-related products.  Not that writing reviews about Star Wars isn’t fun or lucrative, mind you, but if that’s all I write about, that tends to lessen my credibility as a writer.  Besides, it definitely gets old after a while for both the readership and me, so it’s nice to strike out into other areas, such as social networking sites and books of other genres, to add variety to my mix of context.

Take today, for instance.  I didn’t feel like taking three hours just to watch The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly so I could add another notch to my Westerns category in either Viewpoints or Epinions, and I sure as hell don’t want to start reading Plainsong, a book given to me a few years back by someone I used to care about.  Ditto for skimming one of my mom’s many Danielle Steel novels; I’ll probably get around to doing that if I’m desperately in need of bad books to rant about, but not this weekend.

So, dear reader, after doing some pondering on the matter, I decided to tackle the topic of social networking sites at Viewpoints.  I’d already done a review of MySpace, and though I could have tackled lesser sites such as Friendster or hi5, I opted to take a look at Facebook instead.

 My Review of Facebook:

Ever since I first “connected” to the Internet in the late summer of 1999, one of my top reasons for being online was to socialize a bit more than I do in what’s come to be known as IRL (Netspeak for “in real life”).

Perhaps if I had gotten over my deep-seated phobia of driving and I wasn’t so darn shy “IRL”, things would have been far different, and to me the Internet would have been, for a while anyway, an interesting tool to simply look up information in and, perhaps, find employment as a freelance writer or something related to my writing skills.

But because the metro area where I live is so vast and requires either car ownership and/or a reliable public transportation system, my circle of friends was limited to those young men and women who were in a similar bind and/or had not left Miami in search of greener pastures.  And even though this worked out fairly well when I was a teenager or even in my 20s, by the time I was 36 I wanted to at least expand my social circle and perhaps, just maybe, find a soul-mate (or at least a romantically-compatible) woman online.

At first, I used to hang out in Yahoo! Chat before it became the “hapless hunting ground” of porn bots, phishers, and Filipina women in the Philippines who haunt the Miami room in hopes of snagging naive/sex-starved guys in order to get American hubbies.  Back then, I discovered that out-of-Miami women were far nicer than local ones, and so I got involved with at least three of them successively. (I met two in person; one I had a nice long weekend with out West and tried to remain friends with for several years after, while I ended up in a somewhat stormy and unhappy four-year-long “commuter relationship” which concluded on a sour note of discord.)

I’ve since pretty much given up on the Internet as a way to date women; I still get along with women better than I do with guys and over 60 percent of my online friends are female, but I seriously doubt that I’ll ever again seriously fall head over heels online.  The distances are too great for a long-distance relationship to work, for one thing, and my trust reserves are about as low as the Dow Jones Industrial Index is right now.

Where I haven’t yet thrown in the towel - as of this writing - is in making friends.  As introverted as I may be IRL and as small as I’ve allowed my world to become, I still need to be friendly, supportive, and useful to others, as well as to interact with people in contexts that aren’t simply work-related.  And since I’ve become so dependent on the Internet, I’ve found that social sites such as MySpace and Facebook are good ones for this endeavor.

Facebook:

I actually set up a basic Facebook account more than two years ago, but because I spent most of my “social networking” time on MySpace, I did not do anything to it until late in 2007.  I’m still not sure why - maybe it’s because I was becoming unhappy with some of the things people do there to others, or maybe it’s because more of my friends from Miami were on Facebook than on MySpace.

Faceboo was initially a very restricted social networking site - Harvard student Mark Zuckenberg had created it as a Harvard University students-only site in 2004 as The Facebook.  Later, the article “the” was dropped when Zuckenberg and his new company bought the “facebook” domain name a year later.  It’s membership grew as it expanded from Harvard to other Ivy League schools; it then grew further as first any college student anywhere, then any high school student, and finally, anyone older than 13 could open his or her Facebook account.

Like MySpace, Friendster, hi5 and Tagged, there are no fees you have to pay in order to become a member.  Simply boogie on over to www.facebook.com (if you aren’t a member, that is) and follow the easy-peasy directions on how to register.

Although the concept of Facebook is very similar to that of MySpace, there are differences as well. 

Facebook and MySpace - Common Threads

Both sites, for instance, are very youth-oriented and tend to have lots of “apps” that cater to young people’s tastes, whether it be in music, video plug ins, picture-finders such as Hot Babes, or multiplayer-role-playing games such as Mob Wars, Rock Star, Gangster Wars, World War, or World Domination: Total War can be found on both sites, as well as an app known as Cities I’ve Been To, which helps members “pin” cities they’ve visited on a world map.

Members on both sites can add photos or photo albums, leave messages on friends’ profiles, write blogs (Facebook’s is called Notes), and play interactive games on line.  They can even chat on dedicated Instant Messengers; on MySpace this requires a download, while the Facebook one is already in members’ home pages.

Facebook’s Uniqueness

That having been said, it’s my opinion that because Facebook began as an “elite” social site it’s just a tad more grown up than MySpace.  I don’t mean that it’s ”adult” in the “bad sense of the word with an “anything goes” attitude about profile photos or sexually-suggestive profiles.  There may be some of it, of course, since when I do go there I only seek out people I know from either IRL or online sites where I write (Viewpoints, Epinons, Associated Content) I have no idea how wild some of the younger members’ profiles may be. 

To me, the uniqueness of Facebook isn’t so much in how nifty or addicting some of “apps” are or whether or not one can - pardon the expression - “pimp up” profiles as we can do on MySpace.  Apps can be fun - when they work and make sense, which they sometimes don’t - and the site itself can be considered to be what my journalism prof would characterize as an “attractive nuisance” - a pleasant but nevertheless unproductive distraction.

No, to be honest, the big draw for me is that while my MySpace friends’ list is slightly larger (and to some extent duplicated on Facebook),  Zuckenberg’s creation has allowed me to reconnect with far more people I actually know in person than the News Corporation-owned MySpace.

Consider the following comparative statistic:

Of the 44 friends I have on MySpace, I’ve only personally met a grand total of five, including people I went to high school or college with and one of the women I had a brief relationship with after chatting on Yahoo.  Of the four school-related ones, I only knew one well socially; the others were the “hi, how are you?” casual encounters in classrooms or hallways.

Now, though my Facebook list of friends tends to overlap my MySpace list because lots of MS friends also use Facebook, among my 38 friends there I see eight names of people I knew quite well, including three former colleagues of mine from the high school and college newspapers where I learned, among other things, how to write reviews.

Most of my friends’ list, to be sure, still includes many people that I only know from Viewpoints or other sites, but it has been a blessing to be able to reconnect with men and women I considered to be my best friends when I was younger.

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