My Space, Bebo, Facebook...Whats next?

I have to say I don't really understand facebook, there are so many diffrent things and its so complicated(well for me anyway). There are so many of those kind of sites now, an no one seems to stick to just one they keep switching. After joining one you start getting invitations to join another.

First it started with hi5, then myspace, then bebo and now facebook! And each one is becoming more advanced. Hi5 was pretty standard, just a profile and pictures, and you could leave comments. My space was the same with a few more features. Then bebo came along with more features, such as the 'share the love' (where you can give a heart out once a day to only one person), and now facebook which seems to be the new craze. It has so many features compared to the rest.

These sites do get very addcitive. I admit..I am a bebo addict, I'm on it right now as I am writing this. But i don't know why I'm so addicted to it. Most of the people that i communicate on it with i talk to all the time anyway, yet we still all bebo each other! But we're all just the same, addicted. Also find it to be very useful in procrastinating. :)

One good thing about these sites however is that your able to find heaps old friends, and people that you haven't spoken to in ages. So it is a good way to keep in touch, and find people. which i guess is the main purpose of it, and to meet new people, though i dont really like random people adding me. But i wish people would just stick to one site, and not keep switching from site to site. Facebook seems to be the main one at the moment,and I find that very confusing, theres so many things to do on it. this definatly wont be the last site like this. What's next?

"Room 401" viral marketing web phenomenon

Disclaimer: I'm not entirely sure if this is at all relevant to anything that we're discussing at the moment in class, but I thought I'd post about it anyway since I find it interesting.

Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing posted an article yesterday [our time] entitled "Ashton Kutcher's doing some kinda ARG thing?" The article is about what appears to be some sort of ARG that may or may not have something to do with a (fake?) recent VOIP startup called Ooma which Mr. Kutcher has endorsed.

Room 401 is "a television series on MTV, executive produced by Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg. It is named after the room Harry Houdini passed away in at Detroit's Grace Hospital in 1926." (Wikipedia)

Someone has set up a wiki documenting all the bits and pieces that make up this strange puzzle. This is the first paragraph on it: "I was watching "Room 401" on my TiVo when I noticed some weird flashes. When I slowed it down frame by frame, I found a bunch of subliminal messages being held by Ashton Kutcher -- at first, they didn't make any sense..."

So far the online portion of the campaign comprises only a few short, very strange videos, and the starting point for all of it appears to be 43475359616771.com... The videos are all linked to in various formats from the 401wtf wiki, and it would appear that the people creating this large-scale prank are broadcasting their material episodically; there are clues being left in each episode of the TV show, and people are talking about it as if it were a video podcast.

Another piece of the puzzle is 812007.com, which as of right now (6pm NZST) reads as follows:
WELCOME TO 812007.COM!
The Secret Will Be Revealed On AUGUST FIRST TWO THOUSAND AND SEVEN.

There's a forum attached to 812007.com, but, in an ironic twist, it's been invaded by spam bots.
It's quite fun to watch an event like this unfold in real time; a marketing prank like this would not have been possible without the instantaneousness of new media technologies like the internet.

I'd be interested to see what other people think of all this...

--Hugh.

Threadless.com, Where T-Shirt Designers and Buyers Are One

Everyone loves a good t-shirt, especially if it has the power to grab others’ attention or label the wearer as a clever person. I happened upon the website Threadless.com months ago because of their shirts, which fit the characteristics above. Surprisingly, however, I found that this site wasn’t only an online store—it was also an online community of people who designed, critiqued, blogged about, voted on, and bought shirts.

The site sells many t-shirts that all have some unique quality, each striving to send a message that is unlike those found on the clichéd graphic tees that we may find in stores today. For example, there is a shirt with a design that looks like argyle, but upon closer look are really fighter jets streaking across in a triangular pattern. The best part about the shirts is that there is no single designer, not even a couple. The thousands of people of this online store community are all the designers, thus allowing the site creators to sit back and relax while their members create designs, weed out the unpopular ones through voting, and ultimately produce a design they will want to wear, and thus, buy.

Of course, there would be no wonderful designing if there weren’t any motivation. Threadless.com gives $1,500 to those artists who have won the regular ongoing design contest, and money and prizes to those who win special contests (an iPhone is up for grabs at the latest competition). Anyone who is anyone can be a t-shirt artist simply by fabricating a design on his or her computer (with Photoshop, etc.) and submitting it to the site. It is a painless and freeing process, allowing a group of individuals on the web to make what they want to wear. And even if they aren’t the original creator of a design, they are still part of the process because of the feedback they give through blogs and comments on the site.

All of this makes Threadless.com a unique virtual community. Its members share their desire to turn their creative visions into walking masterpieces and spend valuable hours at this task. And by being within a creative community, the site members are allowed to develop their own standards. This aspect of the community fascinates me, because, like in a real community, this one lets people negotiate the rules by which it will be governed. Also, the community actually gets to transcend the virtual and manifest itself into reality through the tangible t-shirts that are bought and worn.

On a more personal note, a couple of weeks ago I submitted a t-shirt design to be critiqued (an optional first step before submitting a design to the site for real). After a few weeks of feedback I altered my design and submitted it. Although it didn’t win a print, the process made me an in-member to the community. I interacted with other members through my design, making me feel like people were listening and helping, all wanting me to succeed. Now I log on often to vote on and critique other designs; it is how I contribute to the community. When myself and other members see a great design emerge I can feel our excitement build, through our comments, blogging, and campaigning. We even grow outside of the community to our friends and family, using E-Mails to urge them to log on and vote for what we like. Not only does Threadless.com’s virtual community provide support and creative freedom, but also the feeling of being part of a group of people who share a love of t-shirts and want to express themselves in this way, as a designer and/or as a wearer. It is immensely satisfying to wear what you helped create.

- Erin O.