Recently in social_network Category

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.

...goes to MySpace in 2006 what I am seeing for now. Not hi5, Tickle, Friendster, Orkut, Wallop, etc. This is no doubt deafies likes to have features in MySpace: blogging, comments, pictures, friends-connection and their own page style design.

I do have MySpace account, and I only post one picture, but never blog or comment there, but I do collect the connection list of buddies (friends) whom I know of.

I remember Ringo was once most popular social networking for deaf back in 2003. Next year in 2004, Tickle acquired Ringo and the deaf popularity has lost interest and decline since Tickle's chose to have their own web interface.

I am wondering how long MySpace deaf popularity last?

I have been a big fan of del.icio.us as my primary bookmark web surfer, there is big news few days ago - Yahoo has acquired del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site.

You might have familiar news about my previous blog entry, Yahoo has acquired Flickr, and del.icio.us now has joined Flickr as fraternal twin in part of Yahoo family. If you are not sure what del.icio.us menas to you, turn it over the page in my pervious blog entry or take a look in wonderful Wikipeia entry.

If you have time, you can take a nosey over my daveynin's del.icio.us bookmarks.site.

Hats off to del.icio.us!

del.icio.us? At first, it sound lot like delicious to me. To break down between dots, Del is sub-domain name, icio is domain name and .us is country code for domain name, for instance: us is United States.

I have my del.icio.us bookmarks: daveynin.

del.icio.us is social bookmarking, social software web service for storing and sharing web bookmarks, launched in late 2003 with very simple web interface design. I joined del.icio.us in early 2004 to check this out, during that time it has become very popular for bloggers and social networking.

During bad times, the web loading in del.icio.us is extremely slow, and I surrender myself. I tried to come back in a week or months later, and the problems continued, so I quit del.icio.us. Few weeks ago, I decided to give a final try, and it came back to normal, and I am very happy with that. I have no idea why I visited that site with bad luck of my time for slow loading times.

Before del.icio.us, I have four machines I am using (my PC home computer, Mac laptop, my two work computers (intranet/internet), I bookmarked one of the web site on single machine, and even not in another 3 machines, I had a trouble with my memory which I am trying to remember which four machines I bookmarked the website on web browser.

Thanks to del.icio.us, I am able to add my favorite web site into my del.icio.us account - to store my favorite bookmark into their network database. I can find bookmark whenever I need to re-visit in any place - work, labs and visitor's house. Keep in mind: Everything posted the bookmarks in del.icio.us is publicly viewable, and it is not a tool for storing private bookmark collectors.

I find extremely benefits to have tags in del.icio.us site, similar as I discussed in my blog entry #674 about tags in Flickr. For example, if I bookmark the Digital Camera resource, and the most common tags are photography, camera, digital, reviews, and reference. I need to find a name of tag, 'camera' to get the result of all of my bookmarks links related only to digital camera sites.

Oh, one more last thing to show you: I added my del.icio.us link section on right side bar, click this to toggle. This list shows the most recent links I posted in my del.icio.us.

Is my del.icio.us bookmark tasty? I'm addicted.

Last Friday, I attended DPHH event to have a socialize and gathering the deaf at Magoo’s. I met some new deaf faces and chatted with deaf peeps. I took pictures for DPHH website, and suddenly, I find a nice image that I would like to share with you:

I received email from deafpassion.com, asked me if I could mention this into my blog. It seems bit odd to me, because they found me through deaf bloggers like Jamie Sommers, and quickly send short message to my email. I went to their site for first time, and I didn't find any interesting stuff on this because I have experience with social networking sites such as Tickle and Friendster.

Oh wait, is Deaf Passions the online community and social networking for the deaf? I have seen some of this like DeafSinglesConnection.com which require to pay the membership for viewing complete profile of singles, send messages, chat rooms, message boards and singles' photo albums. I don't like the ideal to pay to have full features because this might be risk to pay and have a couple online, which I might never know if there is a real person or fake.

The good thing about Deaf Passions, it is completely free. I have seen this main site, Passions Network owns the several communities sites: Computer Passions, Funny Passions, Nerd Passions, Professional Passions and list goes on. I have a feeling about this site: it is designed for hearing web developer, not Deaf web developer. Ditto to DeafSinglesConnection.

Is this sites worth for deaf singles? Hard to trust.

I am member of Ringo since September 2003. Since then, I learned myself that Ringo is part of social networking, and I really enjoyed every minute of every day in first two months since I joined, and I got used to it afterwards.

Guess what? Ringo is now no more. Tickle has taken all over the Ringo, and I will have to get comfortable with the new social networking life.

I find many social networking websites: Who needs Ryze?   Is LinkedIn as good as it gets?   Orkut more?   Is Friendster too slow to load?   FriendFan is coming soon, do I need this?   Microsoft owns Wallop do I put Microsoft in my head?

Nah, I pefer to use Tickle (ex-Ringo) because there are numerous deaf people. It is the only deaf community all I could find.

UPDATE: 2/14/2004 1:18am: Check the headline news about Ringo integrated with the Emode-Tickle company.

I was surfing ringo.com, we really have seen few of fake celebrity in Ringo such as King Jordan, Mickey Mouse, Derek Jeter, and few names. One day, I asked my friend, Sam from Illinois about creating a fake celebrity in Ringo. Sam said, “What about Marlee Matlin?”

Marlee Matlin is an American actress. She began acting on stage at age of seven, and her film debut brought her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in Drama and an Academy Award for Best Actress (at 21, the youngest person ever to receive the award) – an achievement even more remarkable because she is almost completely deaf. Source: Wikipedia

Wow, can you believe that Dr. Jordan is the member of ringo.com! Who is Dr. Jordan? He is the first deaf president of Gallaudet University, the world's only university today.

When Dr. Jordan invited my girlfriend, Stacy in ringo.com as direct friend, and we thought we believe him. Few mintues later, I suspected about Dr. Jordan's profile (take a close look at it) and d'oh. It turned out to be hoax, and tricked us.

Never trust anyone in ringo.com.

I love Internet. Ever heard of Ringo? The term of definiton of Ringo is to expand your circle of friends. Ringo is the easier way to meet people online which you know or met, and you can make expanded network friends' friends.

For me with Ringo, I could always able to see the connection between me and another person (my good friend from RIT). This friend is the element of trust allows me to feel more comfortable and secure when meeting new people through.

My friend and ex-roommate from RIT, Carl asked me to join Ringo, and I am not awkward with this. Carl invited me to become friend connection through Ringo, and I visited his profile in Ringo. He have around 9 friends, include the pictures of his friends, I have met them at RIT during my college times. In my profile, I have 1 friend and 9 sub-friends in community. Ringo is interesting to me.

Two hours later..

I logged into Ringo to learn more about this site, and somehow my other friend, Wendy from NTID made a connection with me, and the sub-friends numbers rose rapidly on my profile. I looked the sub-friends on Wendy’s profile if I know them, and most of them I am very familiar. Even, there are my old friends from WPSD that I haven’t seen them for long time! I had 9 friends and 320 sub-friends in community in few hours!

Ringo is the great place to hear from your old friends from school and college in past to keep touch each other in Internet and their networking!

UPDATE (as 9/6/03 11:09am): I had grown up to 16 friends and 520 sub-friends community.

UPDATE (as 9/6/93 11:17am): Yet again, I now have 17 friends on the list, and number of sub-friends community remains the same.