Category: General

When Friendster came out it was nifty, and cool, and all that. All the cool kids were doing it.

Then came Orkut. Invitation only, which gave it some sort of geek mystique. It was newer, and ‘cooler’; I copied over all my contacts from Friendster and I only sometimes go back to look. Beta, Beta, Beta; and full of page load errors. Orkut got really annoying.

Then the Tribe.net invites started coming from friends. Everyone was moving to Tribe.net. More features, less crashes. Too late; I was bored and annoyed. I created a bare minimum profile and left it to rot.

Friendster has gotten cooler. It does RSS feeds of external blogs MUCH better than LiveJournal does, and I really like that. I don’t want to do my blogging on someone else’s site, and I don’t want my RSS feed used to duplicate my posts so that someone can reply to my post on a site that I don’t read. LJ duplicates posts, while Friendser uses the RSS feed as a table of contents, as it should be, and the links it displays frame my site within theirs. If you reply to my blog on Friendster the reply shows up on my site. This is a more honorable way of handling it than the bastard kludge LJ is doing, where my content becomes part of their site and replies to my content never make it back to me.

It seems like most of my friends who are still active on contact management sites are using Tribe.net. I don’t want to maintain multiple profiles. That gets to be a pain in the arse.

Between Friendster and Tribe, what are you using more?

-Chris

ps. Please DO NOT reply to this posting on the LJ feed account (tampagypsy_feed). Follow the links back to my webite and reply there if you feel the need. There is no way to easily integrate comments from the LJ site back into my own weblog, so the effort of posting to the LJ site is wasted as I will never read it…

Last week several bombs were detonated in the London mass transit systems. Who and why are still questions answered only by conjecture. If it was Al Qaeda then we might as well close down the torture hotel we opened in Cuba, as several years of aggressive ‘questioning’ haven’t yielded enough clues to generate so much as an alert in regards to the recent bombing. This really doesn’t look good for the post-9/11 world of counter-terror intelligence gathering.

In the US we continue to close the barn door after the horses have escaped. In the San Francisco Bay Area that means putting BART on a ‘heightened security status’. What exactly does that mean? That means that the restrooms are closed for the duration and that before a train leaves the last station before the bay tunnel a BART Police officer walks down the outside of the train looking bored. No joke. Melanie and I were taking BART to work this morning and at the West Oakland station there was a departure delay for a security check. The BART officer who walked past our car, on the outside, barely glanced in the window. I doubt she could have seen a package under a seat on the opposite side of the car from her, and I know she couldn’t see under the seats next to the window she walked past. I realized that the officers were not patrolling in order to look for potential problems, they were patrolling in order to be seen.

The Illusion of Security is alive and well in America.

-Chris

ps. Please DO NOT reply to this posting on the LJ feed account (tampagypsy_feed). Follow the links back to my webite and reply there if you feel the need. There is no way to easily integrate comments from the LJ site back into my own weblog, so the effort of posting to the LJ site is wasted as I will never read it…