Life: Me & Facebook

Social Networking is the 'in' word nowadays... but it has been existed, up to certain level, since email gains its popularity. Mailing list or group connecting and allowing groups of email addresses interact each other... then comes the Messenger (Yahoo!, MSN, etc.) which allows peoples communicate online in real time using it's chat facility.

The more complete social networking tools gain popularity, in Asia particularly, through Friendster, and then Facebook.

Well, for myself, I started it with mailing groups... be a member of my ex-university and ex-workplace mailing lists... but then its cooling down because less and less member posted message there.

I never been that active using Messenger eventhough I have both Yahoo! and MSN Messenger account, just use it as and when, mostly to communicate with family members or talk free online instead of using expensive overseas phone call.

Then for social networking, despite its popularity, I never join Friendster just because I don't feel 'fit' into it.... well, this is what called 'positioning' and 'target market' term in Marketing. In my own perception, the name Friendster fit into young age target market (yeah... this is a confession that I am 'old' already... ha3x), that's why most of Friendster members are children, teenagers and young adults. Since I don't have Friendster account, I can't write that much about it... but, to share, I didn't like its look and interface that much... well, probably because I am quite particular on this issue.

Then here comes Facebook. It was started as social networking portal for Harvard University students before it is open up to the world. It is the gains popularity in faster pace than Friendster and more and more Friendster member migrating to Facebook.
As I feel 'fit' into its target market (well, again... this is just my own perception...), I then started my journey in social networking in Facebook... and found it's really fun, and its complete, neat, and well structured features hooked me... so I decided to start building my friends network there... my old high school friends, my previous workplaces friends, and my current workplace friends.

It's quite challenging finding old friends, especially my high school classmates, because it has been 23 years ago and lost contact with them for quite long. But, I managed to get them one by one... it just a matter of time to have most of them since not all of them use computer and know how to use computer. Sharing old memories, old & new photos, and life journey of the last 23 years really exciting and fun, some even make me laugh-out-loud!

Hopefully Facebook will last long enough so I can still link up and maintain this friends networking till I much older and getting lonelier... I am quite optimistic because internet is the future and the computer getting cheaper, smaller, lighter, and easy-to-use... Don't surprise if one day most of the people on the street actively carrying small gadget to do social networking everywhere... Well, this is my vision! ha3x...