Monday, October 16, 2006

Germany takes Facebook to the next level

The topic today: online friend networks. I was reluctant to join them, now I'm in many of them and I still know why I was reluctant to join them: they are superficial and mainly for the purpose of procrastinating and seeing what people from your past look like now. Yet, I like them. I like procrastinating and I like seeing what people from my past look like now.

The truth is, I'm a member of Facebook and MySpace and StudiVerzeichnis, the German version of Facebook. While I rarely ever look at Facebook because it is the lamest of the three, StudiVerzeichnis has one hilarious function: letting you see who has looked at your profile. This turns StudiVerzeichnis to the silliest courting game I have witnessed in some time. One's online stalking is exposed and I think that everyone gets quite a thrill from it. You log on and on your start page see that four new people have viewed your profile. If you're me, then there is a good chance that you already looked at their profile in the hope that they would look at your profile. This new fandangled German thing-a-ma-bobber also shows you how your are networked with people over different people. It shows you how many degrees of separation are between you and exactly what they are. I'm highly amused.

I joined yesterday.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

As a journalist, I would encourage everyone in the world to sign up for all of these facebook like sites. This is simply because it makes it easier to track (stalk? call it what you will) people.

It's also a note of caution I suppose, people don't realize just how "public" this all is. So public it could end up in the newspaper. Achtung!

Anonymous said...

For a while there were these bulletins going around on Myspace about how if you pasted some crap into your html code you could see all the people who had visited your space. I started freaking out, because I had been visiting a certain man's space with a frequency bordering on scary, for some time. So I kept doing it, but without signing in. Brilliant. I still don't know if it was true or not.

skhl said...

germany is awesome, once again
they are all like, well if you are going to stalk, let's at least make it a little productive and try to facilitate maximal hooking up or at least weirding out

Joyce Chapman, Consultant for Communications & Data Analysis said...

the germans didnt think any of that stuff up (though burki will tell you they DID, not to mention having invented god, sex and tampons): you can do all of it on good ol` Friendster. I think Friendster came before many of these other sites, and has since been discarded by most as a relic of the past... sigh. im still on it.

Anonymous said...

Haha ... Friendster. Claire, if you're not on Friendster yet I don't even think I should be talking to you.