webrampage

I’m sorry to be the one to break the news to you, but your Facebook statuses are probably lame. No we don’t care that your goldfish died or that you had an amazing day at work. You’re lucky that FB didn’t come with a “dislike” button.

The screenshot below is an example of a status fail:

I’m not gonna brag, but man I have the best statuses. It gets everyone “liking” it and commenting on it and everything. They’re like hilarious little attention-grabbing things (most of the time).Seriously check them out.

Don’t worry if you’re not talented enough to have statuses similar to mine. Its alright. It took me years of practice and dedication. Here’s a few small tips to get you started:

• For God’s sake use proper grammar and punctuation. “Kool” is not cool.
• Don’t laugh at your own jokes. You look like a retard. No LOL or haha.
• KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.
• Lie. We don’t need to know that you were bored all day. Act super-cool.
• No weird smileys. Actually no smileys at all! I find them annoying.
• Short and sweet. No need for love stories.
• Don’t tag anyone unless you really have to.
• We don’t need to know what you’re doing every single second.
• No rap lyrics, please.

And the most important tip of all! How often should you update your status? I do it every 3 or 4 days just so I don’t spam people’s timelines or come as an attention-you-know-what.

Alright that’s a good amount of tips for now. Start taking in what I just told you and don’t try too hard. Oh and follow me on Twitter just because.

I always wondered if Twitter would make it to the mainstream. I wasn’t sure if it would. Most people were too busy “poking” each other on Facebook or stalking lil’ kids on MySpace. But, it made it…and I’m a bit surprised to be honest.

Twitter just hit the one-billion tweets milestone today. Its not official or anything. The number of tweets were being counted by a 3rd party site called GigaTweet. Twitter might have hit this milestone long time ago since we don’t know when GigaTweet started counting. But, at least we know that we have more than a billion tweets.

You know Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart? Well anyone with a TV knows them. So, they were talking about Twitter on Indecision 2008. That probably got the whole “Twittosphere” twittering. Colbert and Stewart? They like took Twitter to the next level that day. Now the average Joe knows about Twitter and probably even started using it (or at least gave it a shot).

What really convinced me that Twitter got into the mainstream was when I was seeing this presentation by a few folks from a local tech company at my school. They were talking about Facebook, MySpace, Xbox Live, etc. And then they mentioned something that really surprised. Guess what it was? Yeah, it was Twitter.

I was like “Woah! WTF! They know about Twitter? They don’t look like the type of people who would use Twitter. WOAH! Holy shit! That means little birdie made it to the mainstream.” I was really happy for Twitter actually. Its a great, unique idea and its pretty useful too. It deserves to be more popular than Facebook (not kidding).

Well Twitter just took its first step into the mainstream. I’m not sure if it will be as popular as Facebook. It might. It might not. Who knows. But, it sure is on the right path and its getting more popular everyday. Until then follow my tweets!

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.