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Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Unpersonals: Friendster (Then and Now)

filed under: Web Sex Index, Unpersonals by Lux Nightmare | 1 Comment

Unpersonals. You know them. You probably even have an account on one of them, complete with sassy photos, lots of comments, and a multipage friends list. And of course, you’d never, ever use that kind of site to meet someone. Or stalk someone. Right?

Of course right.

We’ve been holding off on this site for a while, because it’s so obvious: and yet it so needs to be done. So hold onto your hats: this week we profile the grandaddy of all unpersonals, the one and only Friendster.

Site Name: Friendster (2003)

Ostensible Purpose: Connecting friends of friends. Allowing people to meet on the Internet without being perceived as creepy. Getting Jonathan Abrams a date.

What It’s Really Used For: Demonstrating your social prowess by amassing a vast and impressive list of friends.

Target Demographic: Aspiring social networkers. People who are afraid of the Internet, yet also drawn to the idea of using it to demonstrate their popularity.

Who Really Uses It: Everyone. I mean, every young, hip urbanite. That’s everyone, right?

Good For Meeting People? If you’re just getting into the Internet, and can manage to get yourself past the whole “Meeting people on the Internet is creepy” thing, then yes, it probably is. If the thought of meeting someone in real life still gives you the creeps, you might just want to stick to amassing vast network of “friends,” bragging about the size of your social network, and leaving testimonials on people’s pages.

Good For Stalking People? Some of the biggest Friendster fans are Internet newbies with poorly defined boundaries/concepts of maintaining privacy on the Internet. These people are liable to put more than a little information about themselves on their Friendster account: it’s Stalk City, man.

Bottom line: Everyone who is anyone has a Friendster account.

Site Name: Friendster (2007)

Ostensible Purpose: Social networking. Videos. Blogs. Forums. Everything that MySpace does, a few months after MySpace has conquered the territory.

What It’s Really Used For: Not much.

Target Demographic: People who want a MySpace-like experience with a better layout and better functionality.

Who Really Uses It: No one.

Good For Meeting People? Not unless you want to meet Jonathan Abrams. He’s probably still using the site.

Good For Stalking People? There is a certain type of person who created a Friendster account and then promptly forgot the Internet existed. These people are not on MySpace, Dodgeball, Last.fm, Consumating, or any of those crazy, modern post-Friendster sites. If you want to stalk them, Friendster is probably your only hope. Of course, in this case, “stalk” pretty much means “Look at four year old photos, testimonials, and friend connections.” But hey: beggars can’t be choosers.

Bottom line: Friendster’s popularity died out around the same time that trucker hats became passe. The site’s owners might try to pretty it up and add new features (look! blogs!), but they can’t escape the fact that, for most of us, Friendster profiles are off in a pile, collecting dust with along with our Uggs, White Stripes singles, and, yes, trucker hats.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

The Sexerati Guide to Unpersonals, Old School Edition: LiveJournal and Make Out Club

filed under: Web Sex Index, Unpersonals by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Unpersonals. You know them. You probably even have an account on one of them, complete with sassy photos, lots of comments, and a multipage friends list. And of course, you’d never, ever use that kind of site to meet someone. Or stalk someone. Right?

Of course right.

Let’s all go meet up in the year 2000, with “The Sexerati Guide to Unpersonals” taking you back to those Web 1.0 halcyon days, in this, the ‘Old School’ Edition…

Site Name: LiveJournal

Ostensible Purpose: One of the very first hosted blogging sites, having opened up in 1999, LJ began as founder Brad Fitzpatrick’s school project, and is now home to over 12 million journals. Surely some of them, if they aren’t your friends, might soon be your Friends.

What It’s Really Used For: The multiple layers of “Friends-Only” blog security, where users can specify exactly which subcliques within cliques can read their journal entries, make LJ a hotbed of sekretkeeping… and ljdrama. Locking down posts also provides the privacy required for bloggers to share their quiz results and cat photos without fear of haters.

Target Demographic: Back in the day? Anyone who wanted “to tell the story of their life, as it happened.”

Who Really Uses It: Remember that girl you met in the women’s room at the fetish party, the one in the handmade corset designed after what she thought a Harry Potter teacher might wear at a fetish party, who gave you her business card that linked to some website with userpics of her that looked like someone unfortunately gave someone a little too much homebrewed mead after the Ren Faire and let them go at the Saran Wrap and Gaussian blur? Yeah.

Good For Meeting People? Searching on Interests might connect you with someone, but who remembers that they put “fraggle rock” and “sassy magazine” in their Interests back when they signed up?

Good For Stalking People? Remember that girl… and her boy-slave, and his longterm partner, and his coven, and their IT consulting startup, and their office ferrets? Sure. All of them belonging to the same LJ communities make catching up on their co-op household gossip/polydrama/favorite 70’s British horror films all the more expedient. (And one of their ferrets keeps a totally mean haiku journal.)

Bottom line: Don’t be surprised if you’re still reading the journals of all of your ex’s on your Friends List six years after you signed up “just to try it out.”

Site Name: make out club

Ostensible Purpose: A true golden oldie, MOC was apparently started by a bunch of indie kids in Cambridge in 2000, and purports to be “an online community for people like you, a place to find old friend and new friends!”…

What It’s Really Used For: …if you can rock a detached pose with your beverage of choice in hand and/or in your obscure, deconstructed band teeshirt.

Target Demographic: Back in college when MOC opened? Anyone who thought putting a photo on a website was too much work, but having a little form to upload it with and a place to aggregate enough potential emo love interest to view it? AWESOME.

Who Really Uses It: Still? *cue crickets, humming New Order*

Good For Meeting People? Back in the day? Good for drunk-searching and drunk-mocking profiles while up too late writing papers. And if you want to actually message that guy who says his favorite thing to do is “drink red wine and dance around the room screaming the lyrics to ‘Teenage Riot’” who can blame you?

Good For Stalking People? See above. Turns out he lives down the hall, who knew?

Bottom line: What I’m supposed to say I love about dating 2.0: it’s so amazing that we have all these tools now to help us build community and really get to know one another on social networking sites by expressing ourselves. What I really want to say, after going back to MOC last night for the first time in years: You know, I don’t really need to know what everybody who’s been given a little white on-screen box to write whatever they want to in has to say.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

The Sexerati Guide to Unpersonals: Last.fm & Vox

filed under: Dating 2.0, Web Sex Index, Unpersonals by Lux Nightmare | 5 Comments

Unpersonals. You know them. You probably even have an account on one of them, complete with sassy photos, lots of comments, and a multipage friends list. And of course, you’d never, ever use that kind of site to meet someone. Or stalk someone. Right?

Of course right.

This week in Unpersonals: Ideas That Almost Worked:

Site Name: Last.fm

Ostensible Purpose: Jumpstarting the social music revolution: allowing people to share their music, discover new music, and tag the shit out of everything in listening range.

What It’s Really Used For: Posting a list of your recently played tracks on your website (or, more likely, MySpace) using the fancy Last.fm code. Finding new music through Last.fm radio.

[NB: That finding new music feature? Ultra useful when you’re going through a break up and desperate to fill your iPod with brand new music that doesn’t make you think of your ex. We’re just sayin’.]

Target Demographic: Anyone who likes music. That’s everyone, right? Everyone except Communists, maybe.

Who Really Uses It:

Nuff said.

Good For Meeting People? Spend a few weeks “scrobbling” your music to Last.fm, and it will generate a “neighborhood” of people with supposedly compatible musical tastes. If you, like Rob Fleming, believe that it’s “what you like, not what you’re like”: congratulations, you’ve just found your soul mates. Leave some witty comments in your new neighbors’ shoutboxes, send them a few messages, and you’ll be set for life.

If, on the other hand, you’re more like me, you may find yourself horrified by the people Last.fm has deemed your nearest and dearest. In that case, it’s best to back away slowly and forget that you ever considered Last.fm a social networking site.

Good For Stalking People? Only inasmuch as observing that someone spent the last six hours listening to Franz Ferdinand can be considered stalking.

Bottom Line: If music is your life, Last.fm is a damn good way for you to find new friends (and special friends!). Otherwise, you’re better off just using it for the scrobbling (which, no matter how dirty it sounds, is not a euphemism for doing it).

Site Name: Vox

Ostensible Purpose: To make blogging “fun again” (apparently, we’ve all been bored to tears by our blogging software for the past few years). To allow you to aggregate all your different accounts into a hideous beast of a one stop shop.

What It’s Really Used For: Cross posting to LiveJournal with posts that say “Read the rest at Vox!”

Target Demographic: Hip kids who are too “grown up” for LiveJournal.

Who Really Uses It: Hip kids who missed the LiveJournal boat and want to prove that they’re still with it and relevant. People with a desperate need to aggregate.

Good For Meeting People? Vox has a structure similar to LiveJournal, which allows for a sort of indirect, getting-to-know-you style of meeting people on the Internet. Chances are you’ll find someone whose Vox makes them look cool, add them to your “neighborhood,” and eventually feel like you totally know them – and one day (sooner, or possibly later), you’ll probably meet them in person.

The real question is this: would you actually want to meet someone who’s really into Vox?

Good For Stalking People? Because of the aggregation element, Vox allows you to observe a whole bunch of elements of your stalkee’s life, all in convenient digest form. Go to a Vox page, and witness someone’s latest writing, photos, books read, uploaded audio, uploaded video – all at once!

Bottom Line: Vox wants so very much to be cool, and we want it to be cool, but – in spite of its pedigree – it just isn’t. Consider it the Nicole Richie of the blogosphere: and consider whether or not you really want to spend time with people who really like Nicole Richie.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

The Sexerati Guide to Unpersonals: Consumating & flickr

filed under: Web Sex Index, Unpersonals by Melissa Gira | 3 Comments

Unpersonals. You know them. You probably even have an account on one of them, complete with sassy photos, lots of comments, and a multipage friends list. And of course, you’d never, ever use that kind of site to meet someone. Or stalk someone. Right?

Of course right.

“The Sexerati Guide to Unpersonals” brings you this, the “So 2.0 It Hurts” Edition…

Site Name: Consumating

Ostensible Purpose: A rounded-cornered place to meet people on the Internet that doesn’t suck.

What It’s Really Used For: Masturbatory stimulation of that unnamed part of the human brain capable of composing a charmingly nervous come-on expressed in the form of a tag. That, and, you know, hella cute photo contests.

Target Demographic: See above.

Who Really Uses It: See above, but five-to-seven years younger than you thought they’d be.

Good For Meeting People? If by meeting you mean, tagging people. You can even listen to records with them while chatting in the pretty little AJAXy autorefreshing word balloons. (Mmm, records. Mmmm, AJAX.) For those a little less freaked by the concept of face-to-face socializing, there’s even user-organized Consumeetings all over the place, conveniently listed with upcoming-style conversations around who you might find there. Which brings us to…

Good For Stalking People? Consumating’s a perfect meta-stalkers’ tool. You can watch your love object’s purposely-messy haircuts evolve. You can observe the scroll of taglove from the people they’ve met in actual real life. You can get all twitterpated when they tag you back! What’s more wondersome about Consumating is how it stalks you — when you’ve been tagged, when you’ve been passed a note, when people have given you the thumbs-up (they like me!).

Bottom line: Nerd love chic — low-key, slightly awkward, and soft, rounded, and easy on the eyes in all the right places.

Site Name: flickr

Ostensible Purpose: Sharing your photos with your friends, your family, or whoever else forms your personal, yet global audience.

What It’s Really Used For: Cruising, duh. From swingers, who you can peg as pretty much any m/f couple sharing a single username to pick up hot bi-seeming women, to hipsters, identified by their jokes-within-inside-jokes use of tags (see also: Consumating) as mating dance, it’s hotter up in there than the back bathroom at Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco. Chances are, if you’ve hooked up there, your partner-cum-paparazzo was a Flickr user, too. Look for the evidence in a photostream near you tonight.

Target Demographic: Everyone with a camera and a dream. And you, too.

Who Really Uses It: Cameraphone obsessives liveblogging their dates, shut-in “emerging” celebs of the Interweb who have fine-tuned their pick-up routines to use the minimal amount of uploads, and yes, even aspiring lensmen and women looking to get noticed for more than their able use of a lightmeter.

Good For Meeting People? For the simple, less obvious approach, stop by the Flickr meetup likely already going on near you. Barring that, putting out there that you do put out by posting a nipple-y photo never fails. It’s not even all that scandalous — this is, after all, for self-expression — and my inner artist is a total slut.

Good For Stalking People? Oh, hell yes. Between geocaching and post-by-phone and, truly, just our own rogue documentarian desire to record everything, Flickr is a stalker’s wet dream. You can even surface on your stalkee’s radar without even having to speak, just by Favorite-ing their photos. Words of caution here: if your stalkee is an ace-Flickr user, they probably subscribe to their Comments feed, so that obscure flirt you left on a photo from two years ago? Yeah. See also: it’s all in public, people. Don’t search and tag to destroy. Who knows whose ex-wife, roommate, boss, or lover is up to the same trouble you are.

Bottom line: What’s beautiful about Flickr is that you get back what you put in. The more naked and real you are, the more likely you are to score some back, instant karma style. There’s nothing we can find to quarrel with in that sort of sweetly equitable dating economy.

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