Dirty Dancing toward the Deadpool
March 6th, 2008 by Chantelle Oliver in Web 2.0 Museum![[Post to Twitter]](http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/tweet-this-small.png)
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MYRTLE BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA—Each of my days inevitably brings with it at least one newborn beta to test. And one more gut-wrenching celebrity tragedy. Patrick Swayze—so masculine he made ballet dancing look manful—has his days numbered because of pancreatic cancer.
Today my beta was Socialthing. Socialthing is, this being 2008, a social identity aggregator wherein your accounts from Lastfm, Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, Delicious, YouTube, Digg and so on are collected into one lifestream as it is now called. All of your real life and online friends’ activities, favourite songs and links pouring forth into your browser. It doesn’t have a lovely desktop AIR client though. It is similar to lifestreams and pownce (they even have a desktop application) and…. I don’t want to look at any of that stuff in my browser anymore. What’s done is done.
Most of these betas will, like you and I, end up in the dead pool. These betas and our socialized afterlife will blaze on after our big log-off, no one linking or even nudging us. Does an unseen archived site or online identity exist if no one visits it? All it becomes is fodder for future social scientists to make succinct and goofy hypotheses.
Facebook, like the inspirational Mr. Swayze (at fourteen, I actually told someone that they couldn’t put me in a corner), is in system-wide failure. Twitter is growing at 2000 users a day. Facebook is irritating that many or more each day. When I set up my social aggregating betas I have come to leave Facebook out of the mix. The old and distant friends I used to remember fondly have all, in their social-net-naiveté, irritated me with their perpetual quiz challenges and group invites. I don’t want to know how cute their babies are or that they have a cold. My past tainted, I cherish my new Twitter pals and their far-flung existences and iconic profile pictures.
Moreover, I hope to never meet them! We, the microboggers, are more well adjusted and have less stress and anxiety apparently. Our social networks are soothing. Unpredictable and murky as they may be.
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Posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 11:38 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.
March 6th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
gotta give props to the Swayze. Although I’m sure his Facebook Fan page won’t like this post one bit.
August 20th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
[...] had to take a quick break from re-writing the movie Red Dawn (it’s a rush job to shoot it before Patrick Swayze passes away and before everyone has jumped on the Cold War resurgence bandwagon) to talk about my [...]