Archive for April, 2008
Social Networks: diaryland.com
April 23rd, 2008 • 8 comments Social Media
I’ve been thinking a lot about what really constitutes a social network. I found this amazing historical and pictorial representation of the launch dates of major social network sites in a paper authored by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison. While this is fairly accurate, I think has missed out a couple key movements in this space, namely ICQ and diaryland.com.
According to Whois.com listing, the domain diaryland.com was registered March 9, 1999 and expires March 9, 2010. I am actually very surprised that most academic and scholarly texts on social networking make no mention of diaryland. Diaryland was founded in September 1999 by Andrew Smales, a Toronton native. Without any advertising, Diaryland soon amassed over 350,000 users. (a pity number compares to now:)
I was a part of the diaryland community in 1999-2002 and even though you couldn’t network or "chat", you could add URLs of diaries you liked on your blog and become parts of groups and have little labels and stickers on your diaries. I would love to interview the founder someday — the site is still active but I think most of the old-timers have moved on to blogspot or wordpress. Anyways, the reason I bring diaryland.com up again is because the new definition of ’social networks’ is too narrow and does not allow the early pioneers to be categorized the same way. Both ICQ and diaryland – allowed you to search for people, leave comments in their guest books or leave them personal notes AND add their URL’s on your blog in support of your new friendship. You see, making new friends and finding old friends on the internet happened back then too – even before we had blogs. According to Whois.com listing, the domain diaryland.com was registered March 9, 1999 and expires March 9, 2010. So perhaps the idea of diaryland.com was conceived even before Livejournal.
(Oh and look, smartypants.diaryland.com wrote a book too, The World according to Mimi Smartypants!)
Allow me to indulge one more fragment of the early internet memories – the chat rooms! How fascinated I was! My dad had just bought an old black and white computer and I’d enter these chat rooms on excite.com and rediff.com (INDIA) and think not twice about making real friends and giving out my real phone number and real name! Today my ex-boss’s children (8,9 years old?? – not sure) friend-ed me on facebook. I think it is cool and perhaps something young parents should expect as their children grow. (More on this later!)
Irrespective, I am unfamiliar with a lot of these sites mentioned in this diagram. But I love it – maybe I will create one of my own personal journey of the internet. It’s amazing though because around 2003 is when the social network phenomena took off and every kind of network mushroomed upon- even a network that allows you to create other networks! (ning.com)
I’m loving Facebook Chat. Facebook is one place for me where I have all my friends from India, Philadelphia and other corners of the world online. I don’t need to have MSN, Gmail and AIM on at the same time. I’m loving it! Some people say that is the next generation of social networks, to me, that is returning full-circle. After all, AIM, MSN chat and other such chats were the early rudimentary social networks!
I have received some emails expressing interest in wanting to learn more about my passion project. I am not ignoring your emails – I’m merely trying to figure out and define my project before I communicate with you again. Thank you for your patience 
Here are some old articles I found about diaryland.com founder, Andrew Smales
Salon.com
Life journey
April 23rd, 2008 • On my mind...
One of my favorite pass-times (apart from stalking people on facebook) is going through random people’s profiles on linkedin.com – to see where they started and what they are doing now. I do that constantly because it bolsters faith in myself and the path I am creating for myself in my life. (well, atleast attempting to)
Some people have a calling, they know they were meant to be a doctor or a designer or a scientist. I don’t know, have never known what I wanted to be. I am turning 25 in two months and I have ideas about what I’d like to do for the next 5 years but beyond that – if you ask me, I’ll draw a blank. And unfortunately, I haven’t met many people like me. Sometimes it is scary to be different in that regard. Because it makes you question whether you are on the wrong path.
But linkedin.com provides me respite – I like knowing and seeing how people’s career paths have traveled and where their careers have taken them. Life is too short to spend it not learning new skills, not discovering new interests and putting yourself in uncomfortable situations. And life also has a way of working itself out.Atleast, it has for all those folks on linkedin
So perhaps it will, for me too.
Combining commerce with social goodness
April 21st, 2008 • Social Media
My previous employer Advanta launched a new credit card in partnership with Kiva. To refresh your memory, I was a part of the kickass team that launched Ideablob last year at Advanta. The newest project that Advanta has unleashed and my dear ex-colleagues worked on is the KivaB2B business credit card.
Kiva.org is the world’s first peer-to-peer microfinance platform that allows US-based folks to lend money to entrepreneurs and small business owners in developing countries. Advanta, is one of American’s largest credit card issuer in the small businesses market. A marriage between the two was inevitable!
For every loan an Advanta card-holder makes to Kiva, Advanta will match the loan amount dollar-for-dollar. American small businesses will in effect, help out small businesses in developing countries without spending any money at all!
Hats off to the visionary Innovation Group at Advanta It is little efforts like these that makes a company special. I will be following their success closely.
PS – I love the credit card design too! My friend, the brilliant Israeli film-maker and designer, Michal Levy designed it.
How I wasted time on the internet today
April 11th, 2008 • 1 comment Social Media
My friend apparently purchased me on Facebook today. So I ignored his request and took a screengrab of it before ignoring it.
And I created a glog of myself today on Glogster.
My passion project
April 10th, 2008 • 2 comments Social Media
So yesterday I was doing some research on how women and men behave online and stumbled upon scribd.com
I’ve known of that website for a long time but I never really used it because the interface didn’t please me and there are too many ads cluttering the home page. But when I landed on scribd.com yesterday, I end up spending over 45 minutes hunting through its archives and database and downloading interesting reports. I also found pdfs of Haruki Murakami’s Norweigan Wood and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. What really amazed me was the amount of information people are making available for others online. Scribd and Slideshare.net are both fantastic examples of a milder version of an online university.
There are basically two types of information people are sharing online: 1) Organized 2) Chaotic. Here’s how I breakdown both: The kind of information offered on sites like scribd.com and slideshare.net represents an individual’s organized thinking: perhaps about an idea, or a topic of interest to them. Their thoughts are usually clear and they articulate it in the form of a presentation or a document. I classify this kind of free information share as organized information — in which, you may not learn a lot about people, but you learn a lot about what they know.
The other type of information share that is happening online is chaotic – this information share is anecdotal, visual, literal and often metaphorical. It may even border on offensive to unnecessary. This type of information can be found on free photo and video sharing websites, blogs, microblog platforms and other avenues like 43things.com, post-secret and ihate.com. This type of chaotic information share can and is usually done behind a mask of anonymity.
As a strategist, I’m most interested in understanding how this information share can be turned to our advantage and how we can actually make sense and benefit from this share. How can we analyze and derive conclusive learnings from this information share? I hear that several agencies and companies are already employing and using spiders and other web programs to gather the free information floating out on the web ether – but I’m more interested in discovering patterns and processes that surround this scenario and figuring out, if there is one, a universal and singular method that can successfully make sense of this massive database of information.
This is my passion project and has been on my mind for the last couple of months. I have some ideas around how to realize this and I’m using the help of some smart, enlightened strategists to help me take this to the next level – but I’m asking you as well — can you help me?
My idea hasn’t matured to the next level and a lot of critical thinking that hasn’t happened yet needs to happen before any of this can make sense to you but I’m excited and I return home from work every night to work on this…
And to add one point of clarification – I’m not looking to develop a system that trolls blogs and other media sites and spews out a reports. There are plenty of those out there already. I know what I am proposing does not have a one-size-fit-all solution — I’m not looking to create another aggregator. What I’m looking to do is simply provide a better means to make sense of the free-floating chaotic information to people like me, who want to better understand people/ consumers.
This idea stemmed out of my very recent experience in the agency-life – any new project undergoes (and rightfully so) massive amounts of primary and secondary research. What I’m trying to prove is, because people are already sharing intimate details of their lives on the web, there has got to be a better way to include those insights in our work.
Anyways…
Spring in New York is beautiful – and it feels like it might have finally arrived. This morning when I was getting ready to leave for work, my area was shrouded in mist. I live by the river in Jersey City/ Exchange Place. It’s only 4 minutes from NYC in the PATH trains but it’s an island of it’s own. Very slow -almost fairy tale like with subdued yellow lights and light-rails right out of an Enid Blyton book making up for the city-scape. (Atleast until you reach the umpteen construction sites…) Anyways, it’s a beautiful day today and I wish more days like today
Happy, almost, summer.