Jorg’s Brain Log

Lot has already been said and written about social networking. There are so many different social networking websites on the net that it is sometimes difficult to pick out the right one. And if you start with one, you will probably end up with several accounts on different social networks as well, because of course you don’t want to miss one friend! Imagine that you do… Everybody will think you are a loser!

Some people really make it a sport to gather as much friends as possible, because they think the higher their number of friends they have, the higher their status in society will be. It’s funny to see sometimes remarks from these highly connected people that they like their real friends, excluding hereby probably at least 90% of their network.

Personally I hate the remark ”real friend”, because it emphasizes the sadness of the fact what they are doing. They are just adding people to their network to please their own ego, and hoping that everybody will say wow. In a later post I will write my own terms about friendship.

The last 10 days or so I invested some time in a famous Dutch social network website called Hyves. In April this year this site had 3,266,581 unique profiles on their site, which is a pretty high number if you a the total number of people living in the Netherlands. Most of them being Dutch and probably between the age of 18 until 25, the age where getting confirmations from people so your are sure about yourself plays a major fact in life. ;) I guess if you are in a club in the Netherlands and see a nice girl you want to know better, you can just ask for her Hyves profile name and you’re on. ;)

At first I was a little bit hold back because most of my friends didn’t use Hyves or don’t live in the Netherlands at all and are out of scope for this website. But after discovering the possibility to find back old school mates, work colleagues from current and past companies I worked for, it was pretty funny! I didn’t expect to find so many old friends at all!

Currently I’m continuing my little experiment. Social networking is really part of the web 2.0 revolution and the way to 3.0 highway of linking everything to everything. I will give some more updates later on, as I’m testing also some other social networking sites and sometimes wonder about some stuff that you find there.