My history of Social Networking

As a kid, the internet was a very strange thing for me. For some reason, after entering some keywords into the address bar, I was able to go to site filled with things of my interest anytime and know any kind of information I wanted. Awesome stuff. I was exposed to the internet as early as 6 years old. Later in my life I was just using the internet to get information on all sorts of things and that's that.



As I get older, When I was in my Form 3 to be exact, I heard of a little thing called Friendster. It is a website that allows you to have your own profile and connect with your friends. Back then, I really don't see what's so fun about it but since it was a fad at that time, I registered myself an account anyway. After a while using it, it was getting kind of fun for some reason. I don't have anything specific that I do there but I just find it fun to be there. Sharing pictures with people, writing testimonials about friends; maybe those are the things that I find joy in doing.



Then came along another new and more deep social networking site known as MySpace. It was getting a lot of attention since it gives you the ability to fiddle around with the HTML and CSS of your profile, which means (for advanced user at that time) you can make you profile look anyway you like. One thing that doesn't attact me to use it at the time is because of the complexity of it. On Friendster, there are very little things I have to manage, such as pictures, friend requests and the occasional testimonials. But here there are many other things to manage such as music, videos and other multimedia things. As I grow older and getting more proficient in HTML, I registered myself a MySpace account. I found joy in making my site as flashy as possible and adding as much people as I can into my friends list; regardless whether I know them in real life or not. Commenting on other people's profile was a blast and fiddling with the elements of my profile was a lot of fun too. I had a lot of things to do and the depth of this social networking site, paired with the (kind of) large friends list that I have, it was something to be proud of back then. And I've also met a lot of interesting people that end up being my good friends up to this day.


Then, came along yet another new social networking site, Facebook. Not many of my friends are there so earlier I just stick to MySpace. Thinking that this thing might be a new fad, I registered myself an account there and just leave it. You know, in case if MySpace became outdated, I already have an account there. As I grow older, MySpace gets kinda boring to me. More and more of my friends are getting on Facebook and so what is the purpose of social networking of you don't have any social to network with. After trying on Facebook for a while, I got hooked on it. It was far more simple, neat, and manageable. It was also very presentable and the profile of other people are much more accessible and systematic. I also liked how it gives us the ability to comment on anything that the person has done; befriend with another person, liked something, changed status and much more. And as I grow older too, MySpace becomes so obnoxious to me with all of its sparkly, blinky, seizure-inducing profiles. Thus, I moved onto Facebook and kept using it until now.


I also have a twitter account. I used it kind of late because to me, it's like another way for people to be able to stalk on you, but then when I think about, who wants to stalk on me anyway. Plus I intend to only update on things that are not really significant. It's a new kind of social networking so it doesn't compare to 3 of the earlier ones.

I think I'm not the only one with this kind of experience though. And I'm still thankful that I had registered on all of those social networking sites. Although the 2 earlier ones are now a pain in the neck for me, I still have them standing, on the brink of deletion of course. They have thought me a few things that I treasure up till today.

• Friendster - early exposure to social networking, picture sharing with friends
• MySpace - thought me HTML, thought me to befriend strangers, a site where comments are the currency of your profile
• Facebook - neat, easy and accessible social networking although with a lot of application notification spam that gets on your nerves

I have nothing against any of the social networking sites if you have to know. Those were the times.

I'm only active on Facebook and Twitter now. Feel free to be my friend on Facebook but I only accept requests from people I know in real life. As for twitter, you are free to follow whoever you are.

FB - Rayza Ridzuan
Twitter - rayza_ridzuan