Virtually Here

Remember the days when diaries were kept in actual books (For Generation Y: The term ‘books’ refers to a set of paper pages bound together for the purpose of being written on using a pen or pencil. You can not use a keyboard and/or mouse with a book) hidden away at the bottom of sock drawers, underneath the bed or in secret compartments in your desk drawer? The reason for this was so that no one else would find about your inner thoughts about yourself and your life. Well those days are gone. Today these diaries have migrated onto online sites like Facebook , MySpace and Orkut and it seems like every day there is a new opportunity for you to spill your inner most thoughts - as inane as they sometimes (read: often) are.

So, why? I personally believe it comes down to that we have a need to share and vent. As more and more of our lives are spent on-line we want to establish a profile there as well so that others can more easily find out who we are, what we like and heck even what music we are listening to right now.

On-line profile/social sites like mySpace have millions of subscribed users and one thing that these sites have in common is the ability to add other users as your ‘friends’ to your network. It often becomes a goal of people to have as many friends as possible on-line and if this is a way to make up for a lacking social life in the real world is a question I will happily leave to someone with a few more degrees in that area than what I have to ponder.

So you have your mySpace/FaceBook/Orkut/[Flavor of the Week] profile set up. You’ve written a short profile about yourself and added twelve photos of yourself showing either limited cleavage and/or your cat, dog, rabbit or sunset - what now?

Well, you share your page with friends and families. Once they subscribe to it they are automatically notified about updates to your site so that they can follow your life and see any new ‘limited cleavage and/or your cat, dog, rabbit or sunset’-photos you’ve added. After your immediate, derived-from-real-life set of friends have been added you will find that others are ‘discovering’ you. People you have no idea who are but for one reason or the other find you to be interesting enough to start following your life. Odds are you will add them - and they will add you. Soon you may have hundreds or even thousands of people following you. You suddenly have an audience. This is where some of the potential of these sites are discovered. If you are interested in any form of creative work that can easily be represented on-line (photography, poetry, drawing, etc) you now have an audience to display your work to and odds are that this audience will be significantly larger than what you would had been able to conjure up in real life. You can post your new work and receive feedback, comments - and in some cases even job offers.

Social ‘profile sites’ have somewhat of a poor reputation and much of it is well deserved due to the content they tend to hold - but it can also become a vehicle for you to reach people with your writing and work and establish a network that is both positive and productive. It’s what you choose to do with the tool.

Different sites also have different ‘target audiences’. In very rough terms you can say that; MySpace: Age 13-20, FaceBook: Age 15-30, Orkut: Age 20-40. Obviously very rough ranges but these are groups that tend to dominate the sites mentioned in this post.

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