Folksonomies

I have to start by saying that I have never been particularly fond of these folksonomies, or so called social networks. Here I have in mind sites like MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and the countless others that are out there. Because there certainly are many of them. And I find that interesting in a way, that people are so eager to create these ever-expanding social networks and to 'put themselves on the map', so to speak, in this conformist enviroment. This is one of the reasons I don't like these networks - I don't like following in the footsteps of others, or being found by all these strange and unknown people that all of a sudden want to become my friend just because they've seen a picture of me, decided that I'm not too bad looking, and seen that I live in Sweden. Secondly, most of the people that join these communities seem to be rather self-obsessed, they easily develop an addiction to these networks, and eventually come to believe that if they won't get a certain amount of new friends and comments every week, they'll be unwanted and uncool. It's different than blogs. With an online journal, I have a choice to lock it, keep it only to myself or to a close group of friends, I have the possibility to keep it completely private, I don't have to communicate with anyone. But these MySpace-ish sites are created specifically for the purpose of social exchanges, there is no sense of privacy. Thirdly, I have an underlying sense of paranoia that most of these sites are far more used as easy spyware access points into my computer than friendship networks. Programs that record information about everything I do in order to later send it over to a commercial third party so that they can make more money and create new spyware.

Take WAYN, for example. I was invited to this site by someone a long time ago, and feeling bored as I was, I decided to join. That was several years ago and since that time I have had absolutely no interest in it whatsoever. A little while ago, I changed my email adress, and it would follow that now I should not be receiving any annoying newsletters from them anymore. Correct? Wrong. With the help of spyware, WAYN has figured out that I have a new email adress, and so they have begun sending me emails to that one instead. Why don't I just leave then? Believe me, I have tried. But these sites only intend people to join them, not leave. So when you actually attempt to do the latter, finding the LEAVE option is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Virtually impossible. Instead, I decided to classify the emails as junk, but that has not helped either, because they apparently send these emails from new adresses everytime. I like to call this type of websites vermin, and I'm sure you can understand why. Therefore it's rather difficult for me to find anything good about them, but I guess they're alright for people who don't mind having their computer cluttered up with spyware and third-party software. If you don't mind, then these sites are excellent for keeping in touch with friends all over the world and meeting new people every day.

...

- Eve.