Social networking drives me nuts - eaten over my time. I'm drugged into Facebook, the most popular social networking for savvy tech geeks and college students. And I'm into Deaf network world.
Why FaceBook? There are too many lists I could given the answer. To narrow into my two most important answer I can provide: connecting the diversity for the Deaf who-I-only-know and 'clean, control & share'.
Connecting diversity into Deaf network
Facebook is the one of the example in social networking place where I can connect the Deaf people who I only know, add 'friends' in our list so I can track to see how their life is doing. Photos. Personal expressions. Stories. And one of few most simple fun part: Sending out the single sentence in status box (aka Twitter-alike microblogging) and poke to friends to let them know that I have read their profile. My favorite part is internal news feed, to track the update news from my friends' Facebook such as add new friends, photos, applications and comments. Maybe I could find the new lover there!
My Story
An year ago, an RIT deaf college intern at Mellon Financial Corporation (then now Bank of New York Mellon Corp) asked me about Facebook and I was told that I heard a little from blog sphere and news. He gave me more depth explanation the growing number of Deaf colleges (from NTID and Gallaudet) network use Facebook, compare to MySpace and I was like oh, yeah. He invited me to join Facebook, that time Facebook is very strict only to people who have email from college organizations, corporations, universities and military to join their network. By time I joined, there are very small Deaf people who I know from RIT, their age is 6-8 years younger apart from my age. There aren't many Deaf who are around my age that time, and I lost motivation frequently visit on Facebook. That was back in 2006.
Past and Present: Ringo, MySpace then now Facebook
I remember Ringo is the first popular social networking for Deaf networking in 2003. In early 2004, Tickle acquired Ringo and the deaf popularity has lost interest and decline since Tickle's overwhelming web user interface. Even we [as Deaf] tried different social networking such as Hi5, Friendster, and Orkut it does not fit the Deaf popularity like Ringo, and deaf social network seemed decline in few years. Until MySpace became big hit over the news - the Deafies followed in late 2005. Then, Facebook became open to anyone with valid email address in September 2006 until word-of-month about Deafies to join Facebook in spring and summer 2007 that caused fast growing number of Deafies to sign up Facebook.
Clean, Control and Share
Facebook is clean and blazin' fast. I can have ability to control what I like the most: privacy settings on each photo, application and comment for anyone or limited friends in my list to view. My most favorite part is sharing, I can allow my friends to tag their or someone name on photos. Also, Facebook provide the RSS feed but limited to - subscribe 'status feeds' from my friends list.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that Facebook is a winner for my time to have frequently visit. I do not plan to close the account in MySpace, I am going to just leave this as "idle" until I come back few times "a month" to check out the remaining friends in MySpace what this might change.
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just like how we agree that Leon is an iLoser ;)
Posted by Jon | August 17, 2007 12:25 AM