Week #2

I'm pretty bad at updating my blogs. But now that I've promised my sister the mp3 player if she plays along too, I don't want to get behind and lose it for her. I'm pretty familiar with using the internet as a social networking tool though. Long distance relationship... kind of a requirement...

So! *cue nostalgic music*

My journey through teh Interweb started back in 1997 with an ICQ instant messenger account. Anyone remember those? Little flower at the bottom of your screen and a truly awful screen name (or number). I graduated to Yahoo Messenger in the cool winter months of [insert forgotten date here], followed by AOL's AIM in [insert another forgotten date here, in fact, that 1997 I mentioned earlier? Totally made up], a short dalliance with MSN three years ago, and the latest notch to the IM belt - an account with Skype. I would like to say that I ended up with the best, most reliable IM service but really, I picked Yahoo for the purple layout and range of smilies...

My history with online journals has been equally promiscuous. LiveJournal was my first. It is full of angsty emo rants insterspersed with every personality and pop culture quiz you can imagine. I was relatively content with LiveJournal. Most of my friends were on there, it's pretty easy to update (except that you have to manually enter the html code to insert hyperlinks and I would always forget the format), but my attention was caught by another: MySpace. Sweet, sweet MySpace.... Songs embedded in your homepage, layer upon layer of profile information, and a guy called Tom who would always be your friend. What more could one want?

Facebook. That's what. Facebook with its gardens, pets, and walls within walls. But it's become something I avoid. I went away for a couple of weeks and got behind with my notices and now I hide from the pirate/zombie/purity/Simpsons/Harry Potter invites and try to pretend that I'll get around to doing them later.

I haven't signed up for a Bebo account - I'm trying to avoid the temptation as I don't need another social networking site in my life, and from the comments I saw in the few profiles I looked at, it seems to be mostly younger tEeNaGed peOPlE UsiNg tH3 s1t3. *winces* reeeeally not so appealing.

So I'll stick with my harem of MySpace, LiveJournal and Facebook accounts and not devote enough time to any of them.