Something a friend said to me today about how the GNE/flickr crowd spends way too much time online got me thinking. I was talking to her about how a whole bunch of us people on GNE moved en masse to flickr when Ludicorp first launched it and how we all tried out/signed on to other sites like orkut, Breedster, Friendster, Kingdom of Loathing, 360°, Wallop and probably others.
All of us were quite happy on GNE and in the initial phase of flickr (lots of live chat, horsing around, etc) But none of us really got hooked onto orkut. Some of us explored Breedster for a short while and a larger number quite enjoyed playing the Kingdom of Loathing. Most of the other social networking sites generally left us cold. Now the #flickr channel on IRC (when people are in there) is usually active with chat, jokes etc. So what I thought was this: we’re people who like live interactions. Live chat, so to speak. We get bored easily with places like orkut which are just fancy “boards.” We need to be able to talk continuously, bounce ideas, jokes (and each other) off each other.
Sure, some of us adapted well enough to orkut and the new face of flickr and some are active on other community and networking sites. But what held us together as a community from GNE (along with some people who joined during the flickr stage) and still holds us together is being able to chat live. To horse around, flirt and emote. Wallop, orkut, 360°, or any other such conventional networking site will never work to keep our community together.
Makes sense?
I think you are right, my friend. You expressed this nicely!
You might find this funny, but Yahoo Messenger, Livejournal, and of late, Koshy’s has been enough,as far as Live Interactions go, for me. 😉
-Beatzo.
bang on
we a totally the crowd that likes to play, and gne let us play and caht all all the same time. And make the chat a play.
just imagine how much fun we’d have at pottery class 😉
These things creeep up on you. I was never on GNE, but I logged in to iamcal several times per day, chatted to people on MSN and Yahoo simultaneously, signed up for flickr as soon as I heard about it, joined in on #flickr when Live Chat went down, joined 360, joined Wallop and had a couple of blogs I attempted to keep going …. and then I realised my virtual life was swamping my ‘real’ life.
My wife, who’s really not interested in the ‘net, mentioned that she couldn’t understand why I spent so much time talking to ‘strangers’ on the ‘net. I think it was this comment that suddenly made me think about it. I cleaned out all the entries on my blog (I never really saw a use for it anyway) and deleted my Wallop account, as the thing was pretty crap and buggy.
Apart from anything else, I’ve been staying up WAY too late chatting, and I know it’s not good for my health. So … I’ve been going cold turkey since the end of last week, and surprisingly, I don’t miss it half as much as I thought I would. Whether I can carry on like this remains to be seen.