Ever since Multiply closed, I’ve been looking for a place to
call home. I wanted things to resemble Multiply as closely as possible—the
ability to blog, the ability to post videos and pictures, the ability to
customize one’s own background to suit one’s individual taste and personality--and
probably most importantly, some prescribed system that lends itself easily to
social networking, as the namesake of these sorts of sites implies.
Blogger doesn’t really fill the bill in a number of
areas. It does not encourage networking
in even the most modest of terms. One must really go out of his or her way to
find like-minded friends with whom to network.
Blogger is also difficult to navigate. In fact, you click on someone’s user name and
it takes you to a person’s profile page instead of their main page, and finding
their latest post or often even their main page from there requires an IQ breaking 160.
A friend and I have discovered a site that has many of the
features that Multiply had—especially, strongly encouraging social networking. However, it seems to be populated mostly by
airheads, refugees from Myspace, kids who got older without actually growing
up.
The bling and glitter graphics is so thick there that you actually
end up leaving the computer with all sorts of sparkly things stuck to your
clothing, along with all sorts of inane pictures dancing in your head the rest of the day--
everything from couples kissing to donkeys kissing—absorbed as if
by osmosis from your page’s comment section.
The bling is even there in the dashboard, a posting section equivalent
to Multiply’s Inbox. It seems this crowd
will even use these childish graphics to respond to other’s serious posts,
which leaves you wondering if there is actually a person behind these creepy
gifs or if they are randomly computer generated. Fortunately, I’ve discovered a
way of disabling the html from being posted to my own page’s comment section,
offering me some relief.
Enter—our plan. My
friend and I have surmised that if we carefully pick and choose our friends
here, we may be able to rehabilitate this site to where serious writing, poetry
and the serious discussion of esoteric subjects will become the norm. It is
going to be a monumental task for sure, given how few mature adults we
presently find on this site.
One problem is that when you join, your page is defaulted to
“private”. For some reason, which I haven’t quite yet figured out, the members
don’t seem eager to change any portion of their page’s status from private to
public. It’s not that they are all posting prurient salaciousness on their
pages, it’s just that they apparently haven’t quite grasped the concept that if
your page is private, no one can know whether or not they want to invite you as
a friend. As I said, most of them appear to be former Myspace users.
Anyway, here is my page, which on the surface looks much as
my Multiply page did. Not much has been
posted to it yet, but you can somewhat gage the possibilities of the site if
you click around on a few of the links. Much of the information cannot be seen,
both because of certain privacy settings that I have initiated to keep the
airheads from knowing that I’m visiting their pages, plus other settings, which
allow only Friendburst members to see certain information on other’s pages:
http://www.friendburst.com/Knightstar// (now canceled)
~Manfred
