6 Degrees of Separation

Almost everyone I know are into some form of social networking online.

For me, it all started from some emails that I sent time to time from my yahoo email account to a group of friends. I felt that since meeting up with most of them at different times will prove to be difficult (but not impossible), a nice sincere email would do to keep them posted on ahtiong-land.

Then I discovered blogging. It was a great tool for me to just write out as and when I like, without having to email it to a significant number of people. Still, my comments to my blog are not that high, which I can live with. This is not some form of popularity contest. My friends, those with some time on their hands, do read my blog. It's just that they prefer to keep some thoughts about the post to themselves, or are too shy to share it with others. They do tell me when I meet them in person though.

Another form of networking I signed up with was Friendster. I remember how colleagues around me started showing off telling me the huge numbers of "friends" they have on that platform. I signed up, added a few photos here and there, sent some friends request, and left it rotting on it's own out there in cyber wilderness. Multiply is suffering the same fate, though I feed my blog entries over there now.

Then came Facebook. Till today people are surprised that I am not already on it. They send me invites; people see my photo in someone else's profile; the conversation swings over to "are you facebook-ing?", etc. I have the view that it is a more advanced version of Friendster, which only got it's break to come up with so many 3rd party apps and advertisers because it gave in to the big money.

And no, I do not own a Facebook account.

Twitter was another application that I ignored for a bit. It's like mini-blogging, touted by a few high profile bloggers in Sg land when it came about. I signed up, then bochup it for a while, made some new friends, added them in, and added the widget at the top of my blog.

The nice people at CBB are quite the social animals. Other then a healthy forum, with chat function (great for mudane days in the office) , many already have a blogging platform in one format or another. These people do not just hide behind the screen online, many meet up regularly to continue the conversation/discussion/bullshite that started online. A good number of them organizes "deathmatches", though I've yet to puke my guts out the few times I met some of them. Perhaps I have just not met the 掌门人 yet. Maybe then I could become one with the longkang...

Many of them have made the switch to Plurk , the next-gen social networking tool, from Twitter. Again, a few are asking me to hop on board. Till now, like Facebook, I have decided to stave off the temptation to jump on that internet bandwagon. They still do some twittering, or have some sort of app to feed their Plurks over to Twitter. So other than not being to cued into their cliques, I'm good with receiving random updates here and there.

Other than all of the above, nothing beats having some fantastic crabs at Sin Hoi San, eh Dude?