This past Friday, I was finally able to get Apple to take my entire summer’s savings for an iPhone. After a year of regretting that I had not jumped on the first generation model, I had no choice but to take the plunge when the opportunity offered itself with the iPhone 3G’s July 11th release.
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Personal
Emotions make social networks meaningful
Image via Wikipedia
A few minutes ago I sat down at my computer, opened my browser, loaded Plurk, and planned to write a short update about how I wasn’t feeling particularly cheery at that moment. But then I paused. “Wait a minute, Andy,” I thought, “is this the place to be getting personal? Is Plurk the vehicle to be getting detailed about why I haven’t had a great evening?” I shook my head, decided against it, and posted to Pownce instead.
As I thought about why I had decided to post to Pownce instead of Plurk, it slowly dawned on me: There isn’t yet a precedent of being honest, personal, or emotional on Plurk. In the few days the service has been available to mainstream users, I had a hunch there had been few posts on an emotional or personal level. Was this the case? Since Plurk allows users to filter by a set of verbs, I selected the most emotional ones (”wishes,” “loves,” and “feels”) and looked through the timeline for updates containing these words.
As I suspected, extremely few updates took advantage of these verbs. As I scanned through the public timeline, I noticed a bunch of trivial updates: one Plurker sharing the movie he was watching, another linking her latest blog post, a third rejoicing over a newly-acquired dancing banana. Rarely was there an honest-to-goodness post about a bad day at work, falling in love with a classmate, or sharing a fantastic day with the kids. As a result, I felt uncomfortable adding my own more personal thoughts and feelings in the Plurk timeline.
At first I considered whether or not this was a problem. True, web services adapt to fill certain roles, and maybe there’s a deep-seated need within the internet community for a (more reliable) platform for sharing these trivial updates. The thing is, though, Plurk is a social network, which means it can only be as strong as the relationships between its users, and the unfortunate truth is that emotional and personal updates help found and strengthen these relationships. Without a precedent for honest disclosure, I worry about the service’s staying power.
Plurk has a lot going for it. It’s reliable, fun, and different in a good way, but similar in a way we’d expect, too. However, these advantages bring with them a set of cons, as well: the whimsical look and feel of the site, short-form nature of the updates, and emphasis on quantity over quality (viz. the Karma system) detract from the requisite humanness of social networking websites.
My gut feeling: Right now, Plurk is the one-night stand of the social networking world. In order for it to be any more, it’s got to help me feel more connected to other human beings. And it’s not.
What do you think? Does Plurk seem a little too impersonal and sterile for your liking, too? Or am I making mountains out of molehills? And another thought: Why has Twitter never seemed so impersonal? Back me up or call me out by leaving a comment. You’ll help test out my new Disqus implementation while you’re at it!
(Need to know more about Plurk? Start by checking out these resources, or jump in headfirst by joining up today!)
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Opening Day 2008
I took a quick trip home this weekend to attend the Washington Nationals’ opening day game (Nationals: 3, Atlanta: 2) in brand new Nationals Park. What a stadium and what a game! Despite the chilly weather, thousands and thousands of fans made it out to admire the beautiful ballpark. You might want to watch my Flickr slideshow (click here) to get a real feel of what the game was like, but here are some disconnected thoughts about the night:
- the stadium, although it doesn’t particularly stand out, has a very clean, friendly feel and fits into the DC feel extremely well
- our seats (section 313) offer a great vantage point
- the physical chairs are much too small– it was almost unbearably uncomfortable to have fans on both sides
- free towels and ticket holder lanyards!
As my dad puts it, it’s a shame the stadium seems to be built with the following priorities, in order: 1) make money, 2) offer decent baseball, but Washington will take what we can get. I’ll definitely be back many times this summer!
Keep reading if you want to see my photos of the event and the televised broadcast of Zimmerman’s big hit!
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