When I was in high school, no one used the internet but geeks. In fact, when it came to the internet in a lot of ways I was abnormally ahead of the curve. But when the teenager crowd was ignoring the internet, the thirty year olds were well versed in its ways. In fact, towards my senior year the new big thing that was just becoming popular among the older crowd was Instant Messaging, in particular ICQ. I was on it with the rest of the older people of the internet while the teens were just beginning to look at the internet, if even that.

A few years later, my now best friend met me on ICQ. She is a good four years younger than me and as it turned out the ICQ bug had finally caught up to teenagers and it was the main way that teens were using the internet at the time. Meanwhile many from the older crowd had caught onto a new website that was pioneering the web at the time, Myspace. Teenagers of course hadn’t caught on yet, but it didn’t take them long to jump on that bandwagon as well.

Sooner than you know, the “elderly” of the internet had moved onto Facebook. During my times of college, it was a well known fact that when a potential employee applied at a new job, the employer would do their homework and check the web, but the site that they would check out these new people wasn’t myspace, it was Facebook. Why? Because if you wanted to be a serious professional, you had a facebook page to suit.

Now it seems right that while the grown ups have moved on to Twitter that the teens have moved into Facebook as they leave. However, it seems completely off to me that the teens wouldn’t move on to Twitter at some point. Twitter being completely geared around the cell phone and text messaging seems to go hand in hand with the culture of modern teen life. It is actually kind of odd that it is adults who have found twitter, this actually seems to be a trend that you’d think was made for teenagers. But it isn’t.

I think this is an interesting thought though. In so many ways, it is the teens who have always dictated fashion, style, music, and yes even technology of the country. But in the internet, I don’t see it. It is reversed for some reason. Maybe it is because those who embrace this technology as children and young adults are branded as “geeks” or “nerds.” As adults, these same people are often thought of successful and it is this difference that creates the model for the internet trends and explains why it is that teens remain behind of the curve.

I don’t know whether the next trend for teens is going to be Twitter or not for sure. I find it likely that it will be, but who can say for certain. I think the only competition for it is Google Wave, but I have a feeling that like previous internet fads, Wave will find itself a lot of 20-40 year olds all the while teenagers will find the beauty that we currently know is Twitter. It seems likely that teens won’t understand Wave until the older people of the web have grown tired of it and moved on.

The whole thing started with Ultima Online really, after all everyone says it is the father of modern MMORPGs, coining the term even. Yet the game took some serious steps back when it came to player interaction. Previous to UO, there were private messages and groupings, but in Ultima Online they wanted a more realistic approach so both were removed. Obviously Ultima Online had learned some of its lessons because they have since returned Instant Messaging to the masses, however this is what started a trend of being too little too late for the entire genre of games.

Some games since then have mistakingly done without the chat room atmosphere that has been around forever in the form of IRC such as Asheron’s Call. This also was a mistake that even they have since rectified.

The latest addition to the MMO community has been email. This was popularized by World of Warcraft but I think the first game to do it was really City of Heroes (well obviously older MUDs were doing it, I more mean modern game).  Did this revelation strike anyone else as a “really?” moment? I mean really? This was a big innovation in community building? Something that has been on the internet since ummm… well… the internet was born?

Don’t get me wrong here, having access to e-mail is great in game, but it strikes me as a bit odd. It isn’t even an open system. I have friends in EQ2 currently that I haven’t talked to in awhile. Wouldn’t it have been great had they created a system where I could have emailed someone from outside the game and they got the message inside the game. Such as me emailing Razakius@mistmoore.com. I don’t think it would have been a hugely difficult propisition. Furthermore, they could have then allowed people to tie that account to their real email boxes like say gmail. I could then read that email at work, or on vacation and be able to respond to someone about an upcoming raid. How great would that be? But no, just simple in game only email. And email with really bad spam filters and macro capabilities at that.

Another newer idea came from EQ2 which was a personalized page on their eq2players site. Which is a really great concept actually. I mean imagine a MySpace game for your MMO pleasure, except that the page updates with your latest worn items, accomplishments and other in-game information. It really is a great idea. Except that EQ2 forces you to pay for so many of these features that the player pages are almost worthless to see on their own right which takes away the point. Also, unlike MySpace, you have no ability to customize the pages or add news or events or even comment on someone else’s page. Again, taking away much of the fun of this type of page, they could really make it a destination for players. And then they could even take it a step further and allow people to see friends and friends of friends much like facebook which would help people meet other people which I think is part of the point.

This brings me to the last thought on social networking and online gaming. What really needs to happen with these games is to bring the game outside the game. To make it much more pervasive. To make you want to be in the game by giving you more ways to see what is going on inside it. For instance, I don’t think twitter in itself is that great, it is that they opened up the API that made it great. So given that the API is open, why not have MMO updates sent to your twitter account? You could have all sorts of fun with this from allowing you to make a tweet to having the game automatically tweet when you’ve finally killed that big boss mob. Even better what if you could post an in-game tweet of an item you found that is cool that links back to your web page that displays what the item is? This is a great way of bringing it back to the game.

But this sort of stuff I don’t think will ever happen largely because game developers are extremely closed-minded in nature. Not in that they aren’t open to new ideas, but they want the outside world barred of from the world that they create. While you are in their world, they don’t want you to see what is going on outside. And while you are outside, they don’t want you to see what is going on inside. There is a huge wall between these. I’m sorry to sound cliche though, that is wall that needs to be torn down.

Shelfari seems to be the most popular of the two websites. They have some fairly big tech names subscribed to their site.  The site is the older of the two, but not by much, just a few months. I think that it actually gets much of its popularity from the fact that it is owned by Amazon.com, thus giving it a fairly large in with book buyers, and I must admit the interface of the website is initially very appealing.

As you might expect, the website displays your collection of books on a shelf, hence the name. So you get on your profile this long artificial shelf with the book covers facing out of it. The middle of the shelf shows books you are currently reading, the left showing books that you are reading next, and the right has books that you have read as well as a rating of each. The visualness of the shelf is kind of cool. I like being able to look at all the covers of the books that I owned lined up next together. The site is also extremely AJAXified so it is really easy to navigate around.

However, the site began to get to me after a short time. While the book shelf started out to be a very compelling way to go, it quickly started to seem gaudy and a bit much. The site I think did recently update the look of the shelves to be a little less, but even so it seems to be a bit much.

Goodreads on the other hand puts on a very simplistic interface. It is extremely texty. It does have images of all the book covers out there for each book that you’ve read/reading, but otherwise there really isn’t much to it. You add your book, it gets added to the list. The beauty of this site is that it really isn’t flashy or complicated. And yet there seem to be more features involved with it. In addition to the standard reviewing and joining groups. You can update status of books that you are reading as well as short thoughts (kind of like tweets) on where you are with the book. They offer trivia on books and famous quotes to add to your collection of worthwhile quotes. Another nice touch is that your book updates can be added tweeted so that your twitter is constantly updated with less input from you directly.

In short, I get the feeling that goodreads stays more true to the actual readers that like to read, whereas shelfari is just trying to catch the casual readers who might be more attracted to the flashy. I also think I would add that I find the newsletter that goodreads has put out to be nice. They only send it out like once a month (I don’t get any other annoying emails from them which is amazing) and some of the articles are actually good. This month’s articles featured an interview with Jodi Picoult which if you ask me is pretty cool.

For my money, I choose Goodreads. Don’t get me wrong, I think that Shelfari is pretty decent, but there is something to be said of the simplicity and the wealth of features that Goodreads has that makes it the social networking book site of choice. I kind of wish they had a similar site for movies and music, or one that kind of combined all three. But I guess these segments of the market are kind of getting filled by the likes of netflix, hulu, and iTunes even though none of these are really social networking sites.

On top of that, at this point I only have a list of about 60 common droppers that drop back when I drop. I suppose I could just use one of the lists that is provided by another site, but I wanted to grow my own list and get my own people. People that were somehow related to this blog.

But at the end of the day, even if I got my time down to the 30 minutes for 300 drops, I decided that I don’t want to spend my time on that every night when I come home from work. I’d rather do other things like write blog articles, write ehow articles, or play games. I don’t want to waste it on getting credits for advertising, especially on a network that is known for bringing a lot of false traffic to your site.

That isn’t to say that I don’t think that all the traffic hasn’t been worthwhile, surely I have gotten some regular new posters which I have appreciated quite a bit. But again, I guess I would just rather see my traffic grow more naturally. I think I get better hits when I write an article that strikes a chord with someone and they decide to post it on their site. If I get an article like that I get more than 3 times the traffic that I normally get with my dropping. Sometimes, it really has been between dropping and writing and I haven’t wanted to lose the droppers so I drop instead of write.

I’m not completely done with it so fear not, I just am moving in that direction. I moved the drop advertisements off most my pages, I am not actively searching NEW droppers. I’m mostly now just answering others drops, so if they drop me, I drop back but I’m not dropping anyone else. My problem at this point is I do have a lot of credits to spend and I do think that the advertising has a better chance of getting real viewers so I want to get my credits worth that i earned. That will take a little time, but in the meantime I will be earning less and less I am sure.

Twitter: Obviously my first entry should be Twitter as it is what got me started on the whole thing in the first place. Twitter acts as a good complimentary blog for this blog. Allowing me to add small mini-posts that are of often unimportant, but sometimes humorous, events in my life. It also lets me post something that I may completely forget about later. The thing I think makes this service work is really the cell phone support. Having the ability to make a small post while I’m out actually doing stuff is really nice and really integrates my blog into my life much further.

Profilactic: This one pushed me further into the social sphere. It is basically an aggregator of all your social services. What really makes it nice is that it has support for a ton of sites, including just basic RSS feeds. Their current touted number is 180. I found a lot of these cool services on this particular site. But they also have a wordpress plugin which allows you to display all the info from all your social sites onto your blog or website. This means that I could post a picture on flickr or a video on youtube, and you’d be able to go to my lifestream and see what exactly I’ve been up to. It really makes stalking much easier!=P One thing I really dislike about this site is that while it touts 180 supported sites, this isn’t nearly true. Many of the “supported” sites are nothing but a link on your profile. Some say they are more, but the amount of support is minimal. Such as ask500people, which it fully supports but doesn’t actually update anything for it unless you post a question (at least that’s my guess). There are similar sites like this, that you must make a post for something very specific in order for it to work and sometimes it is difficult to figure out what.

43 things: This was actually a lesser known service that I found, and one of a conglomerate of other services they provide (43 people, 43 places, all consuming, and best lists). But this one in particular was one which allowed you to do something new. It allows you to create goals or life lists and share them and their progress with others. This is really an amazingly cool idea really (in a way it goes together really well with 43 places too). So what I can do with this is say something I’d like to do before I die is go to the Amazon rainforest, well I can enter that on the list, and it will keep track of what I want to do. In addition, it will show you others who are also trying to do this and allow you to comment on it. So I got a “Lose 20 lbs.” goal, I can go on, see who else is doing it and add an entry to it to say that I lost 5 in the last month. A really cool service, and I hope they continue it and find success.

Ask500People: I’m not really sure if this qualifies as a social service in the same vein. It is essentially a polling site, where you can enter polls or answer them. It is very flexible and shows who has voted for what and where they are from (using google maps) and allows you to comment on polls. It isn’t a hugely original or innovative idea, but it is nicely put together and there are some fun and interesting questions. My main complaint is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to track how you’ve voted or anything. I’d like you to be able to look at someone’s profile and see how they vote, and perhaps find people of similar interest in that way.

Change.org: In a way, change.org is kind of like 43 Things for a global betterment. It allows you to find causes, and follow goals to achieve those changes. It lets you post both goals and causes. It also allows you to add organizations that help causes as well and you can follow them, donate to them, and create groups to collectively donate. It is a nice site. I enjoy looking through it and it has also given me good ideas on how I can better the world through changing my life. It doesn’t seem to have a clear way to aggregate this stuff to post on my site, which would be a nice touch, but still it isn’t a big deal.

Clipmarks: An interesting idea, that I’m not entirely sure how much I will use. Instead of bookmarking a site, this allows you to basically bookmark a part on the site. Clipmarks will save it to their site for you or your friends to view. So it is like an online clipboard. If you see a picture, text or video you like, just clip it and you’ll save it to clipmarks. Again though, not sure if I’d use this much.

del.icio.us: Not a new site by any means and I’ve had it for quite awhile. But did get reminded of it, and downloaded a plugin that will save bookmarks to delicious easily from my browser by just bookmarking normally.

Digg: I really don’t particularly care for Digg anymore as it has gotten overcluttered by stuff and flamers. But if you are looking for a site that allows users to choose what in the news is important, this is still the best. It is just too bad that it is almost exclusively 10 best or 10 ways or 10 weirdest posts…

Flickr: Again not new, won’t talk much about it. I actually am starting to really dig Google’s Picasa but the fact remains that this site still has a lot of advantages over Picasa. You can easily post pictures via cell phone, and then embed people’s pictures on your website easily (not unlike youtube for pictures). These things Google has yet to implement for some reason, and I think is holding Picasa back because interface-wise Picasa is just miles ahead of Flickr.

Friendfeed: Another version of Profilactic but doesn’t support as many different utilities. Actually this one is much nicer, and does indeed have a feed for your site. But you can’t customize the feed as much as I’d like and as such I’m not totally sure about this one. I think this one has a lot of promise however, much more than Profilactic has.

Minta: Yet another Profilactic version. Minta seems the earliest in development as there isn’t a lot you can do with it yet but shows the most promise. The interface design is the best, and they already have a decent support for various services. What it seems to lack so far is the ability to put your inta onto your blogspace so people can check up. You also can’t look at other people’s profiles like other services allow. This one is just you and your friends. There is an RSS feed so I think with a little more work you could output this to your blog, but this one like I said seems to be the least developed and hopefully these features get fully integrated soon.

Orangutag: With this one, you add in the shows you like which ones you are watching and it tells you other people with similar interests and it also updates you when a show is on the air. I like the concept of this one, and I think they could later add in movies as well to really get into it. But right now it suffers from not really working well. After I registered and verified my email, it refused to let me log in for a day. This morning it works fine but it is obviously a glitchy service.

Wakoopa: I think this is kind of cool because it is a program that keeps an eye on what programs you use and then comes up with graphs and such for your computer usage. It lets you share this info, and review programs that you use, and then it tells you programs and people you might like based on what you use.

Youtube: Again, everyone knows what this is. Again a ton of copy cats. Again, no one is as good as the original.

That is lists. Digg has become list-central. Just a quick perusal and you get lists of reasons to switch to linux, best things about macs, reasons to hate the RIAA, best ways to optimize firefox, best iGoogle apps, etc. Now don’t get me wrong, these are often handy lists, with often useful information. But it has deluted Digg to the point where it is difficult to find ACTUAL NEWS on the site anymore. All Digg is now is a site for people to submit their lists and have other people rate them, often complete with rants and flames.

Now adays I think that Newsvine.com is the better source of news that allows users to rank and submit stories, as well as pays writers, and has an editorial stance to make sure that the good stories actually are on top instead of the lists. I think you can even emphasize that Digg even realizes this issue as the only thing left in the company that is worth the time is Diggnation which is still really good, not only because Kevin & Alex are funny, but also because they pick out the best stories. Note that this is editorial, they don’t use the most popular, just the best so that they can take out the crap… aka Lists.

In fact, I’ve taken my Digg app off my iGoogle page as I write this and have replaced it with Newsvine’s feed as we speak. At least I will know what is actually going on the world more.

I just downloaded the beta of Flock and playing around with the new browser and all it’s nifty little features. It is actually kind of cool. It’s essentially FireFox with a little beef added to it. The UI is very slick and much nicer than FireFox. It also has integration with Flickr, photo bucket, del.icio.us, blogger, live journal, and other online services to name a few. I can upload pictures, put them into blogs or emails share my favorites lists, and put favorites into delicious. All this with little to no extra effort, without ever visiting a website and without using up my link bar on silly text links that take up lots of space. They don’t seem to have integrated support for frappr or kaboodle yet which would be lovely additions, but maybe those will come down the pipe. Oh they also have support for technorati which makes adding the blog and tagging it easy as pie and you will likely see my blogs now have technorati tags attached to them.

I like the browser, however I don’t think there is enough here for the average user to make the switch. If you are a serious blogger or use flickr way too much for a healthy individual you will need this browser. I can’t help but wonder who they will raw in others though. Most people don’t care about these types of features… though I do think they add something to the Internet to make it more useful… it just isn’t enough for other people to join in. This browser in every other way seems identical to Firefox and I am just not sure if that is going to be enough to get people to make a change. They will have to do more to make every day Internet life easier without images and blogs. My only idea on this would be an integrated email client so you wouldn’t need a second program for this or built in support for gmail or something (my guess would be yahoo as they seem to be partnering with yahoo quite profusely). Having these as separate programs is not needed in this day and age and I think a merger is long overdue and may give flock the kind of additional push it needs.

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