I created a Face book group for filePro

[Fairlight]

This public service announcement was brought to you by Kenneth Brody:
> 
> I have a Facebook page, but that's basically because my high school's
> (mumble mumble) reunion is coming up next year, and they're using
> Facebook to get everyone together.

You go to those? *shudder* I couldn't be paid to go to a class reunion.
There aren't enough people I cared about back then to justify it, and even
less that care about me. :)  Which is cool, since it cuts an expense.
Advantage of being by and large a social outcast as a teen.

I've contacted and been contacted by a few former friends at
psychotics.com--er, classmates.com.  I think everyone I knew back in school
that I've met up with there has either been arrested, tried to commit
suicide, or is just plain unstable.  I've had a horrible experience with
ex-classmates, and classmates.com is a terrible spam mill towards their own
customers, former and present.  I've blacklisted them after a recent week
of 1-2 emails a day trying to get me to look at stuff.

> Note that, from what I've seen, it also appears to be aimed more at
> grown-ups than teenagers, which is my impression of MySpace's target.

I dunno about that.  Targets tend to shift on their own.  While MySpace
does target the teen/pre-teen (I -refuse- to use "tween") crowd, many
artists (musicians, authors, actors, etc.) have MySpace pages that have
been used to some great success to update fan communities with constituent
members ranging up into the 70's.  It's grown a bit virally, unfortunately.

I have a MySpace page that reads, "This MySpace intentionally left blank."
It has a URL to my personal homepage, because I absolutely -refuse- to do
personal data more than once unless it's making me money.  The only reason
I have one at all is because people have asked me to look at theirs and you
can't if you don't have one yourself if they have it set that way.  For
some insane reason, it's like Microsoft Word--everyone assumes you have it,
so they send .doc files to you unsolicited.  (It's not hard or expensive
to convert to PDF, which is at least a reasonbly widespread standard that
one can utilise free of charge...geez.)  Now everyone just assumes you have
MySpace, FaceBook, PhotoBucket, LinkedIn (arguably a huge waste of time
even generating an account...it's never done a thing for me), and a few
others.

Irony being, I'm observing a trend where people are -just now- getting onto
instant messaging clients like Yahoo IM, MSN, and ICQ.  I was using ICQ
back before 1998.  We've had individuals using it unofficially for a
decade, but you're getting this trend in businesses where they're actually
lifting firewall and software restrictions to the point where they're
finally saying, "Hey, this is a valid business tool.  Get yourself
connected, use whatever resources you need, make it happen."  

Same thing with VOIP, but on an even later curve.  I'm not talking Vonage,
I'm talking things like Skype (which sucks, IMHO), Ventrilo, etc.  They've
been viable for business meetings for several years, and now people are
starting to adopt this technology in earnest for business use.

Then there is software development.  Used to be you hardly heard a word
from the vendor between releases.  Then John Carmack at iD Software used
his .plan file as an update back in the days before "finger" was considered
a social engineering risk and widely disabled.  Arguably the first "dev
blog", despite not being web-based.  Nowadays we have tonnes of developers
into everything from games to business applications, and they're all
jumping on the Developer's Blog bandwagon, and even starting up forums and
maintaining them.

Given those trends, I think we can expect to see more social networking in
terms of business, getting serious about 3-5 years out.  It doesn't make
as much sense in terms of many businesses, but people have used them to
some great success depending on their particular efforts.  I've seen more
than a few purpose-designed publicity campaigns that used MySpace, involved
puzzles and such being designed, etc.  I doubt all the permutations have
been gone through on how to use this effectively as a marketing/business
tool yet.  I personally think it's more effective to have a well done
corporate web site and host it yourself, but you know--a lot of places
don't seem to want to bother, and they'll just MySpace it.  Or they'll do
both to reach a broader audience.

We're already seeing the start of it with YouTube.  Just yesterday I was
watching an UbiSoft trade show video demonstrating their Far Cry 2 map
editor--on the UbiSoft YouTube channel that they run officially.  Arguably,
YouTube will probably grow the fastest for business use.  It makes more
sense in many ways than something like MySpace, and the applications are
broader.

I just can't decide if it ruins something organic and creative by
commercialising it, or if it legitimises something that was originally
a questionable waste of time (or at least just a hobby) by making it
something with a hard commercial application.  I think both situations are
kind of a shame.  But the same thing happened to the net in general, and we
seem to be surviving--despite the best efforts of our legislature.

mark->
-- 
"I'm not subtle. I'm not pretty, and I'll piss off a lot of people along
the way. But I'll get the job done" --Captain Matthew Gideon, "Crusade"