So once upon a time there was friendster. I remember almost nothing about friendster except that once I decided to leave it, it became more like the ex boyfriend that wouldn't leave me alone. It kept e-mailing me begging me to come back and see some improvements. I think there was orkut in this time frame too but I only remember the name.

Then came live journal which I still adore as a great way to keep in touch with friends from college. Many of us have moved all over california, a few to penn, seattle, and another to florida, so lj is an easy way for me to keep up with them. I might have signed up for myspace around this time too only because some of the stormriders convinced me that it was really cool... or maybe I ignored them and waited awhile before I signed up. And while myspace is great for random amusing messages from guys i've never met and never will, I've never found much use in myspace.

Then was grad school and facebook opened up to a few schools, Stanford being one of them. It was incredibly useful. You could see what schedules people had, rate professors, and find other students in your class. While I was reluctant to sign up for yet another social networking site, I came to really like this one until I graduated.

My interest in facebook faded when I entered the real world and same with my social networking except for lj. Fast forward a couple years, and I start partying in LA again and I find tribe. I really really really like the layout of tribe. This is one social networking site that not only seems useful but has a large number of great features and does them all well. Ok, well, until it keeps breaking. Damn you tribe! You had/have potential. And while it picked up greatly in the burner/party/belly dancing scenes, I haven't seen many other people talk about it which surprises me.

So there is in an interest in facebook again to make up for tribe. I sign back in to find facebook completely transformed. There are a large number of dumb applications that you can add that really just waste time and clutter everything. It went from a pretty useful social networking site to a pretty useless one. And there have been others lately, tribe refugees, plaxo to organize them all, linkedIn to connect all of the people that you used to work with so that if you ever look for another job, you have a huge list of contacts, going.com for the party scene etc, etc, etc. But the thing that amazes me is the interest in facebook. When I started going back to grad school (again), I find the Stanford cs profs pushing facebook as a place to discuss class lectures. Web 2.0 seminars are using facebook as the example of social networking becoming the norm. According to a friend from Berkeley, Randy Katz gives Dave Patterson (of Hennessy and Patterson) endless amounts of shit for not being on facebook. (Ok, sorry, big geek points if you know those names or you can wikipedia them). Coworkers that I wouldn't expect to be into social networking are there. My spinning coach posts the music from each workout on her facebook page. I'm not sure what exactly they did right, but it completely amazes me that everywhere I go in silicon valley these days, I see more and more references to facebook which I think has gone from a pretty useful site to an incredibly annoying one.

I guess this is just a really really long post to mention the fact that I really seem to have no clue what aspects will draw people to a networking site. It's fun to watch society as it ebbs and flows through them though.