webrampage

Are “social sites” like music? Yes, I’m asking YOU.

By social sites, I mean social networks, social news, social bookmarking, micro-blogging, etc. I’ve been thinking and that question just popped up. Well lets try to find an answer.

When a song gets pretty popular, what do we do? We play it on the radio, listen to over and over again, tell our friends about it and listen to it a few more times. The band (or the singer) is glad that everything’s going perfectly and the album was a great success. But, what happens after a few weeks or maybe months? Doesn’t the song feel overplayed? Don’t we get sick and tired of it? Don’t we start to hate the song? Don’t we just move on?

Are you starting to figure out why I’m comparing these? I personally would say that social sites are a lot like music. They’re both fads. But, know what? Music is actually a lot better than social sites. I don’t know if I can call music a fad because we do move on after a song (or the album) gets overplayed, but we also go back to it after some time. Whether its months, years or decades.

But, what about social sites? Do you think we will ever go back to an old site? Do you think you’ll ever go back to a site that was once popular years ago? Do you think we’ll start using it again because it once had cool features? Music lives forever. Want an example? How about Led Zepplin?

Remember MySpace? Friendster? Do you think you’ll go back to use them? They were once really, really popular. Well MySpace still is, but Facebook took over. Plus I would say that Facebook is also going a bit dead. Like when it first went popular, people at school were talking about and were like going crazy about it. Now, no one even mentions it. They still use it, but its not that cool anymore.

Sucks to be a social site. They’re like toys. You play with it, get bored, throw it away and start playing with a new one.

Image by Janneke Hikspoors.

I cannot believe it! Barack Obama is spamming Twitter! Oh man. I now see why Fox News was comparing Obama to Osama. Oh I feel bad for Fox now. No one believed them. I didn’t believe them!

Okay lets cut the drama queen (should be drama king, right?) crap now. But, I did notice something weird about Obama’s twitter. He is following way too many people. We’re not talking about a few hundred or even a few thousand here. We’re looking at a 5-digit number. 76K!

Man is that normal? Is the guy working on his campaign or just following people on Twitter? I guess he got hooked or something. Oh man I’m going to jerk-mode now. But, seriously 76K is a lot. And he’s got only 73K followers.

You wanna know how he followed back so many people? He’s using a script which automatically follows you back once you start following him. Just add him and then look at the list of your followers). But, he doesn’t actually respond to your tweets (and he’s not even interested in them). Twitter’s servers are constantly having “technical difficulties” (aka downtimes). I wonder if Obama’s account caused all of this. Probably not.

So, is he actually “follow spamming“? Well I personally wouldn’t say that. Maybe it technically falls under follow spam, but he doesn’t mean to. He’s just trying to keep people updated about his campaign. I don’t like the fact that he’s using a program to automatically follow people back, but it was probably the nuthead running his account’s idea. Well that’s a different thing.

We all get spam and find a ton of them on the web. So, we kind of go into our anti-spam/ninja-killer mode whenever we see something that looks a bit like it. We don’t really think about it and see if it really is spam. We don’t look at people’s true intentions. Well look at the definitions!

So, next time think about it and check if it really is spam. And if it is, then rape that fucker spammer. Until then subscribe to my blog via RSS or email if you liked this post (at least a tiny bit).

The question used to be, can Cuil beat Google? Now its more like can it actually compete with Google?

Everyone was so excited about Cuil. They got a massive traffic. But, they fucked it up! To be honest, they just went public too soon. It should be more like private beta (if not alpha) right now. Having a nice design, a good privacy policy and a huge index doesn’t mean they’re going to be successful.

Its funny how people change their mind on something. People were talking good about Cuil and the next day, they start hating on it. I tried to support Cuil. I thought they would improve over the next few weeks (or maybe months). But, I’m not too sure if that’s going to happen.

Their search results are getting worse everyday. Last time, I searched for “webrampage” on Cuil I got some pretty decent results. Now I don’t even get that. All the results are completely irrelevant and they even included spam sites. They even repeated the same site five different times. Just take a look and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

You go to a new restaurant and the food there is just horrible. Do you think you’ll ever go back there? What if your friends tell you that the food has improved? Right now, Cuil is like that restaurant. Its hard to fix something when you look like an epic failure.

I’m not sure if people will ever give Cuil another shot. Some people might. But, most of them probably couldn’t care less. Well Cuil needs to work their ass off before they can think of that day. I still can’t believe that they went live so early. Where they high or something? And I thought I made bad decisions.

Oh wait. I didn’t answer the question, “Can they compete with Google?”. Do I really need to? Can they even compete with Ask.com?

Well I’ve said enough about Cuil today. Now its your turn to share what you think. Do you think Cuil can compete with the big guys? Will you ever give it another shot? Or do you think Cuil is just an epic failure?

Photo credit: Jacob Wackerhausen