An Airhead in Limbo

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