Social Networking

I’ve used social networks for many years. I opened a MySpace account at the behest of a friend. I didn’t immediately sign up, instead I waited a few months. It wasn’t because I was weary of the online social scene; I just didn’t see the point of the website. At that time, I used the web for e-mail and getting news about topics that interested me, I didn’t see the point in social networking. Eventually, I buckled down and joined the site.

My experience with MySpace was rather uneventful at first; I created a simple profile based on the default template and add a few friends who I knew from work. Other then that I didn’t do much else with the site, maybe because everyone who I was friends with were people I saw on a daily basis, so I didn’t see the need to communicate with them online. Eventually I began to see the usefulness of the site and as time progressed my friends moved away. Since I was in the Marine Corps I moved around a lot and so did my friends, because of this MySpace became much more relevant.

After I started using MySpace more often and seeing what other people did to their sites I decided to redesign my space. I added some graphics, changed the background and tried to make it a little more stylish. I thought about adding music, but I didn’t want to accost people with my musical taste. I also tried to get as many friends as possible, and in a sense compete with my other friends. I didn’t like going to other spaces and seeing higher friend counts.

Today my perspective on MySpace has changed, where before I focused on friend counts, today I am more interested in maintaining close relationships with people who I actually call friends and communicate with. I also restrict my profile to only friends, and only accept friend requests from people I know. This has limited my friend count, but the friends I do have are much more meaningful.

The other social networking website, with which I have intimate knowledge, is YouTube. I can say proudly that I knew about YouTube before it was famous. It was 2005 and I was working on a documentary about my recent 10 day trip to Israel. I got back in July and started working on the documentary immediately. Even though I spent most of my free time working on it, it still took me a good 6 months to get the entire project finished.

When I did finish it I wanted to distribute to all the friends who I went on the trip with. I thought about sending everyone DVDs, but that seemed too costly, I wanted an easier way to distribute my work. So I started to search online for websites that hosted videos, and the first one I found was YouTube, so I signed up and submitted my video. I submitted the video on January 26, 2006, and as of this post I currently have 11,899 views. It was my first documentary and the first video I ever put online.

Since then I have had numerous compliments and e-mails from people all over the world who have seen the video and have thanked me for putting it online. This encouragement inspires me to produce other videos some of which are on the site. I haven’t done another documentary yet, but I am working on one about my mother which I plan to place online before her birthday on October 1st.