(no subject)
Jun. 10th, 2011 06:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psipsyAh, Livejournal. Didja know that I've had this for over 10 years now? I got it right after I got laid off from my old job, figuring I'd have nothing else to do. (I've also had the same AIM screenname since '98, but that's a different subject.)
Over the years I've watched it grow, and shrink. Out of the list of friends, most of those accounts have gone inactive. The total has been shrinking because of accounts getting outright deleted.
So why do I keep going? It's simple, really. LJ's entries allow up to 65k characters, which can make for some rather deep reading. FB's posting doesn't allow for much, except for Notes, which are more secondary to the focus of the site and nobody on FB reads those anyway. Twitter tops out at 140 characters across the board; which is ok for quick missives, but not so much for building steam. MySpace was and is an experimental joke to me, which is just as well because while LJ seems to be coasting like it ran out of fuel, MySpace is crashing like all the engines are on fire.
Which brings me to another point: Social networks trying to go corporate. After LJ sold out to the Russians, I think that's the point where they jumped the shark. When Rupert Murdoch's company bought MySpace for a ton of money thinking he'd make several tons of money from it, that's when they jumped the shark. Will Facebook jump the shark? Eventually. It might already have, such as when they announced there will be Facebook stock. And there's the problem. Trying to monetize random blurtings of millions of people can't possibly have any long-term profitability. When they try too hard to please the investors while ignoring everyone else (user base, game/application developers, ads), the ever-fickle audience will get up and leave for that Next Big Thing in social networking that's sure to be already hatched by some kid in his basement. When (not if, but WHEN) that happens, it's going to be messy and disastrous and I'll be glad I didn't drop a dime into their stock.
But, either way, I'm still here. I still tune in on a regular basis, even if I don't update or comment regularly. I keep my old entries; I like to read them to see how I've changed over the past decade. And hopefully, I'll be able to look back at these current entries ten years from now to see how much more I'll change.
Over the years I've watched it grow, and shrink. Out of the list of friends, most of those accounts have gone inactive. The total has been shrinking because of accounts getting outright deleted.
So why do I keep going? It's simple, really. LJ's entries allow up to 65k characters, which can make for some rather deep reading. FB's posting doesn't allow for much, except for Notes, which are more secondary to the focus of the site and nobody on FB reads those anyway. Twitter tops out at 140 characters across the board; which is ok for quick missives, but not so much for building steam. MySpace was and is an experimental joke to me, which is just as well because while LJ seems to be coasting like it ran out of fuel, MySpace is crashing like all the engines are on fire.
Which brings me to another point: Social networks trying to go corporate. After LJ sold out to the Russians, I think that's the point where they jumped the shark. When Rupert Murdoch's company bought MySpace for a ton of money thinking he'd make several tons of money from it, that's when they jumped the shark. Will Facebook jump the shark? Eventually. It might already have, such as when they announced there will be Facebook stock. And there's the problem. Trying to monetize random blurtings of millions of people can't possibly have any long-term profitability. When they try too hard to please the investors while ignoring everyone else (user base, game/application developers, ads), the ever-fickle audience will get up and leave for that Next Big Thing in social networking that's sure to be already hatched by some kid in his basement. When (not if, but WHEN) that happens, it's going to be messy and disastrous and I'll be glad I didn't drop a dime into their stock.
But, either way, I'm still here. I still tune in on a regular basis, even if I don't update or comment regularly. I keep my old entries; I like to read them to see how I've changed over the past decade. And hopefully, I'll be able to look back at these current entries ten years from now to see how much more I'll change.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 01:18 pm (UTC)Good news
Date: 2011-06-10 01:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 04:10 pm (UTC)