Idle poking about

I'm so bored at work today that I started idly poking about different websites.

I found out that BigAdda (an Indian social networking site) is running a weblog written by Amitabh Bacchan (or so they say.)

More poking around. Their blog runs on WordPress. Their webserver is Apache and its all running on an Ubuntu Server.

WordPress themes folder

WordPress plugins folder

How do I know this? Well, the silly people have not disabled directory listing, so after guessing it was a WordPress install, I started checking out the standard tree of Wordpress folders, so now I know what's in their plugins folder and their themes folder and of course the helpful line at the bottom tells me they're running Ubuntu. Oh and for what its worth, they're actually running WP 2.5 or above.

Struck

Something a friend said to me today about how the GNE/flickr crowd spends way too much time online got me thinking. I was talking to her about how a whole bunch of us people on GNE moved en masse to flickr when Ludicorp first launched it and how we all tried out/signed on to other sites like orkut, Breedster, Friendster, Kingdom of Loathing, 360°, Wallop and probably others.

All of us were quite happy on GNE and in the initial phase of flickr (lots of live chat, horsing around, etc) But none of us really got hooked onto orkut. Some of us explored Breedster for a short while and a larger number quite enjoyed playing the Kingdom of Loathing. Most of the other social networking sites generally left us cold. Now the #flickr channel on IRC (when people are in there) is usually active with chat, jokes etc. So what I thought was this: we're people who like live interactions. Live chat, so to speak. We get bored easily with places like orkut which are just fancy "boards." We need to be able to talk continuously, bounce ideas, jokes (and each other) off each other.

Sure, some of us adapted well enough to orkut and the new face of flickr and some are active on other community and networking sites. But what held us together as a community from GNE (along with some people who joined during the flickr stage) and still holds us together is being able to chat live. To horse around, flirt and emote. Wallop, orkut, 360°, or any other such conventional networking site will never work to keep our community together.

Makes sense?

Social network madness

Wasn't the acronym YASN coined at least two years ago? So what's with all the new social networks springing up? And why don't any of them work well? Gah!

What I am on...

• LiveJournal
• Yahoo! 360°
• orkut
• Flickr
• Ryze
• Friendster
• Breedster (is my bug still alive?)
• Three Degrees (been a while since I logged in I think)

I was also a GNE prototype player and someone might eventually invite me to Wallop too..

*sigh*

UPDATE: I forgot to add Hi5 (a piece of crap) to the list and I'm also now on Wallop. Yay me!

I used to be able to handle this...

There was a time I was pretty cool with whatever went on in the world of computing. I was a mad code monkey that wrote programs in assembly for fun, wrote DOS utilities, batch scripts and some simple database programs (for a library and a hospital.) The Internet came to India and I was on top of things since a geek friend and I hacked into the VSNL server in Bangalore and created accounts for ourselves. (Well, not really, it was simpler than that, but if I tell you how simple, I can't brag then, can I?) That time has long since passed.

All my friends went on to be computer engineers and I studied biology. I finished a bachelor's degree in biology and got a master's too. My metamorphosis from computer geek to biology geek was complete.

Nevertheless, I still played with computers a lot, never did any coding ever though. I surfed and surfed and then surfed some more. I had a million (some would say zillion) accounts wherever they were free and some paid accounts too. I was active on newsgroups, on fledgling social networks, played online games, and chatted with friends across three networks and IRC. Phew. And all this while being a grad student at university.

Today though (and for a few months previously) I can't be that active anymore. I barely make the time to read and reply to email. I check friends' blogs for updates maybe once every two days as opposed to several times a day! I rarely ever login to orkut when I used to be on for most of the day earlier. Yahoo! Messenger which would have me logged in even while I was asleep, hardly gets a workout these days. And I login to MSN only to play Minesweeper Flags with friends.

So why am I boring you with all this? Well, it's just so if I don't comment on your latest blogpost, don't read your new 360° page/blog, don't reply to your email as often, you know why! ;) (Yes, Yahoo! 360° yet another social network is out and I have a page there...)

The funny thing is, just about this time last year, I was writing this post about how cool (sort of) my online existence was! One year later...