Virtually Here

To the computer/social network savvy person WiFi connection is like gas is for your car. Thing is you don’t want to pay close to $5 per gallon for it (or whatever the equivalence would be for WiFi connection fees). You want it fast and you want it free. When you walk into coffee shops today there is a sea of laptops sucking the WiFi out of the air as fast as you can say Twitter. But how do you find these places and if you do, how do you find more - and maybe even other wifi-junkies in your neigbourhood?

Short of walking around, reading reviews online, etc there are now a number of sites aimed at helping you to get online for free - and to find other likeminded people.

Fon has been around for some time now and attempts to establish a community of other FON-users that share their own WiFi with others (requires you to purchase and install a small router) for free. If you are not a FON user you can still acess FON-networks for a rather reasonable fee. It’s a good concept but for me it fell short for two reasons; 1) the need to purchase a router and 2) the charges to non-FON users.

Whisher is another offering that is similar to Fon but it does not require any hardware installation nor does it charge anyone any fees regardless if they are signed up to share their own WiFi or not. It’s a great concept and something that I hope will take off even more than it already have.

WeFi is one of the later products to hit the interweb and it’s one of the more promising in this area. WeFi is all about helping their users to find available, free WiFi wherever they are. After installing the connection software you let the system know where you are located and up comes a map showing you where you can find open hotspots near you. These hotspots have been mapped by other users and you can return the favour by adding the hotspots you know of. The next feature of WeFi is the social aspect of it - you can with a flip of a button see who else is connected to a hotspot through the WeFi software. You can browse their profiles and even start chatting with them. Sounds creepy stalky-prone? It could be, but there is no denying that this does indeed upon up a whole new way to connect with like-minded people through the internet.

WeFi is a great concept but it is suffering from serious teething issues to the point that I have personally found their software to be so unreliable that I have, at least for now, opted to not use it. I’m keeping an eye on their site though in hopes to see signs of improvement.

There are obviously a number of other offering in this area (WeRoam is another promising product) out there but the ones listed here represents some of the more known and ’stable’ services you are likely to find.

So if you often find yourself out and about with a laptop - or any other WiFi enabled gadget - do yourself a favour and check out some of these sites. They may just allow you to add some web-surfing to that grande, non-fat latte I know you’re craving for.

As the internet became an integral part of so many lives - as a portal to games, relationships, communication, work and…the list is truly endless - it didn’t take long for us to seek out solutions to staying connected even when we had to leave the computer and venture out into the Real Life (commonly referred to as ‘RL’ by die-hard connectionados).

And if market economy has taught us anything it is that once there is a demand - there will be a supply of solutions to meet that need as long as you are willing to pay the price.

I was for about three or four years ago sitting at a bar with a friend of mine and we started counting the various ways that we, as we sat there, could connect to friends/families and colleagues. Out came cell phones, PDAs and laptops. We could SMS, IM, Email (text and photos) and call by using a combination of our gadgets and there was a sense of ‘accomplishment’ in having those abilities available to you even sitting there at the bar. Now, a few years later the same, and more, ways to communicate can easily be found in all but the lowliest of cellphones. We have become truly mobile.

But is this constant ‘connection’ to the hive all good or are there aspects of it that can have a negative impact on how you go about, and enjoy, your life?

So, we have finally arrived to ‘today’ (pun barely intended) and how we use the internet and associated devices to interact with people. Virtual Social Networks are in full bloom and it seems like every day there is a new product launched. Many of these products enjoy only a very passing interest from the very fickle and savvy audience that they target, but some of the offerings have been around for years and maintain a user-base of several thousands - and in some cases millions of users.

So what makes some of these Social Networking tools more successul than others? Is it all in the timing? Brand loyalty? Does people move with their groups? Free versus subscription based services? We’ll be taking a closer look at many of the services that you may already be using (read: Flickr, MMORPGs, Twitter, IMs, etc) but we will also be exploring the ones that are still flying under the radar of the masses but that may soon ‘pop’.

Coming up next: How do you connect?

So, we’ve reached the point in time when the internet started to mature and it was common for people to be ‘on-line’.

Social Networks flourished. At this time mostly in shape of chat rooms and instant messenger tools because remember that many of the accessories that make virtual networking so seemless today were not fully there yet (cell phones, digital cameras, smart phones/PDA’s, etc). As the internet ‘matured’ more and more people ‘moved’ parts of their life on-line simply by having to be connected for work or school. As such it became second-nature to start doing your errands on line (on-line banking, grocery shopping and personal emails just to mention a few). This also called for another shift in user-base. Back in the gloomy computer rooms, connected to a mainframe, and in the BBS world, you would mostly only find people that could easily be classified as ‘geeks’. Now, everyone was connected and the kind of interaction that people sought online changed along with that.

Join me on this blog as we reach ‘today’ with all that the internet has to offer in terms of Virtual Social Networks and discover some communities or ways of interaction that may surprise you.

It’s hard to remember when exactly I was first exposed to the internet but I think it was at an ‘internet cafe’ in the early 90’s. I remember using a browser called Webcrawler and my friend who patiently showed me around ‘the net’ made me believe for a long time that all the internet was good for was to look up porn and random trivia. I guess in a way not much has changed.

As the internet matured, and more and more people started to gain access to it, it rapidly killed off the BBS communities that had thrived for the past four-six years. Nodes were shutting down daily and it became harder and harder to push messages and updates around a network that fewer and fewer computers were connected to. UseNet dwindled away but still have, for various reasons, a devout following and have managed to survive where so many others passed away.

Almost over night social networks started to flourish on the internet. Some of the pioneer were names like Classmates.com (1995) and AOL. At it’s peak AOL provided Internet access to over 30,000,000 people and were one of the first internet providers to establish concepts like chat rooms and private rooms.

What we were about to see the dawn of was - Web 2.0

The BBS community experienced a tremendous growth and popularity and had many die-hard followers that made significant independent contributions to enhance the rather basic functionality it provided. But it was still only a tool made available to a select few - the people that cared enough about installing and using a modem and sacrificing their phone line while they were ‘online’.

This sense of exclusivity strengthened the community in a way and once again there was a common ground/interest that bound people together and provided a platform for communication. We ‘chatted’, we ‘emailed’ and we played ‘non-real-time-on-line-games’ (who needed fancy graphics - or colors for that matter?) . We were in essence surfing the internet but not in real-time. Something that now years later proves to be almost impossible to explain for the Tweens of the internet-era.

But the days of the BBS were numbered as approaching at a lightning speed at over1200 baud was - the internet.

With no established internet for the casual home computer user there was no longer the ability to connect computer-to-computer. It didn’t take long though until the Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) entered the stage and provided a basic mean to re-establish this connection.

A BBS was a computer that acted as a node in a larger network of computers connected through a periodic dial-up connection. Users could connect in to your BBS by dialing up to it and for instance leave a message or make a move on a strategy game. During night your BBS would be contacted by the network (a common one at the time was FidoNet) and new messages would be dropped off at your BBS and messages left at your site would be picked up and carried onwards to other sites.

Sample of BBS screen

Basic and slow? Yes absolutely. But we were connected once again. The need to share information and thoughts with other like-minded individuals without having to be in direct physical contact was re-established. The future looked bright and this was just the beginning.

As personal computers started to appear on more desks around the world the need to be hooked up to a mainframe to be able to process data went away. But something was missing in those early days of PC use. There was no well developed internet [Gasp!].

The internet did exists but it was far from what we experience today. Emails were mostly still just for professional use and ’surfing the web’ was simply not done. Why not? Well, the main reason was connectivity - or rather the lack of it.

The common Personal Computer user used his or hers computer as a word processor with some additional benefits like spreadsheets and databases. Data was predominantly shared through diskettes (remember the big 5.25″ floppy discs?).

There were no (or very few and very cost prohibitive) ways to gain access to the Internet as a personal user.

So for the ones that had enjoyed a short taste of ‘on-line comraderie’ in MUD-like games where they could interact with people from all over the world - this was a huge step backwards.

But to each problem there is at least one solution and in this case the solution came with another three letter acronym - the BBS.

In the mid-eighties I often found myself in the computer lab at my University. Often late at night and often without anyone around. For those that missed out on the X-Generation I may need to clarify that a computer lab at this period often, as in my case, was made up of a number of dummy terminals all hooked up to a mainframe computer (VAX being one popular make at the time) if you printed anything out the sound of the smattering matrix printer would echo down the hallway as your striped paper neatly folded up underneath the 100 pound+ printing terminal. PC-whatnow?

As much as I enjoyed working on whatever class assignment I had in front of me I also found myself missing, in lack of a better word, entertainment. The matrix printer just didn’t do it for me. Queue the M.U.D.

MUD stands for Multi User Dungeon and was an ASCII/Text based-only adventure game that allowed multiple people to get together and move their characters (an ‘X’) around a very complex cave system in search of dragons and gold while interacting with other people (in some ways not much have changed) - over the computer.

This was such a revolutionary experience that people from all over the world found themselves staying later and later in their college computer names. In some cases camping out all night. But what was so addictive? Games had been around since the beginning of times. The hook was that you could interact in real-time with people, strangers to you, that apparently shared an interest with you - and without leaving the computer (well, terminal). Does it start to sound familiar?

As mainframe computers became replaced by personal computers with independent processor capabilities, graphics and easier access the need for the type of interaction that some people had gotten a taste of didn’t disappear - but instead it found new ways to meet that need.

Join me as we work our way out of the MUD and onto the Personal Computer of the late 1980’s.

Geek.

Nerd.

We’ve all heard those names before and maybe even been called one of them at some point.

Virtual Social Networks were in essence created by and for these geeks and nerds. I know. I was one.

Mathematics is one of the core loves of any self professed nerd. It’s logical, understandable and reliable. Dealing with mathematical formulas doesn’t disappoint you, they don’t act irrationally - and you also don’t have to leave your desk, hot-pockets and six-pack of coke to interact with it. But mathematics can only be your friend so much. It’s predictability eventually becomes a limitation for even the most die-hard coder. That, and one of the most fundamental - and in many ways conflicting - need is to show people how good you are (often in a not-so-secret hope that you will be proven to be ‘better’ than other people at what you do). So, put logical problem solving and a competitive nature together, add the need to be able to execute it from the safety of your home (read: computer lab) and the ability to interact with other like-minded beings and you have just created the first Virtual Social Network: The MUD.

Don’t know what a MUD is? Tune in for the next part on this blog.

Know all too well what it is? Tune in anyway. I think we got some eye opening spins on it coming your way.