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Facebook is considered by many people to be a more mature online social networking service¹ compared to MySpace² . Facebook focuses more on the concept of networks: you belong to an area, a school, a company or some other group on Facebook which becomes your primary network. As of this writing, Facebook does not allow you to directly edit the entire layout of your profile, which is considered a blessing and a downside, depending on which group of people you talk to. You can, however, customize where different parts and snippets of information get placed on your layout.

MySpace is considered by many to be the most widely known online social networking service in the world. MySpace focuses more on the concept of adding friends and other people to your profile so that you can get to know them more. MySpace allows you to edit almost the entire layout of your MySpace profile. Again, just like Facebook, this is considered both a good and a bad thing, based on the preferences of different people. Maybe having different preferences is what life is all about, right?

A Facebook account, at the moment, focuses heavily on comments and other ways of interaction to help people communicate. A MySpace account, at the moment, focuses heavily on comments, direct messages, and the actual profile customization to help people communicate. MySpace also has its own instant messaging service, called the MySpace IM that you download onto your computer to chat with all of your MySpace buddies or strangers. Facebook, in contrast, has developed its own in-browser chat service, enabling you to chat with any of your online contacts within your browser, while you are actively browsing or doing anything on your Facebook account.

Do you prefer Facebook or MySpace?

So, back to our original question: based on the above brief information, would you prefer using Facebook or MySpace? Are there some other points or reasons for your answer?

I will stop here so that I can do a few things, including checking a message I got on MySpace and sending a message to someone on Facebook. Thank you for reading.

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1. E-mail

   I remember an era during the 90’s when signing up for dozens of e-mail accounts was cool. Having so many e-mail accounts did nothing; sending an e-mail was still sending an e-mail. People back then had Hotmail [now called Windows Live Mail], Coldmail, Yahoo Mail, Mail.com, ICQ mail, and AOL mail. Now, people also have Gmail, self-hosted e-mails on personal domains, and more. Having more e-mail accounts was once considered a status. Now, even though many people do not realize that each existing and additional e-mail account can bring in its own unique benefits and downsides, more and more people still keep opening new e-mail accounts daily.

   Opening e-mail accounts is one of the longest lasting online trends ever, and e-mails are still one of the most widely used online tools, if not the most widely used online tool.

2. Guestbooks

   This trend also started more solidly in the 90’s, and continued all the way until the first year or so after 2000 under the original name “guestbook“, after which the name continued and continues to lose its popularity to other terms and concepts which have been derived from it. The term guestbook came from the actual guestbooks and the same term used to describe books at places like museums, where visitors could leave comments and remarks for others to see, whether anonymously or with any detail. Online, in many cases, the guestbook became more popular than e-mail during its strong day, not in number of users but in actual fame, among many people who had guestbooks like Bravenet Guestbooks.

   Guestbooks paved the way for public comments that we see on blogs today. Overall, Guestbooks are still around in their pure form and in some evolved forms like online blog comments. Original, pure guestbooks themselves have lost a lot of their original popularity. In many cases, guestbooks have lost popularity and ground to the very concepts that were derived from them, like comments and forums.

3. Online diaries, blogs and their variants

   Online diaries were the sites that brought blogs into existence. Technically, blogs are nothing more than diaries. Of course, the concept of blogging has been commercialized and now online diaries, the very sites that started it all, are considered immature and not worthy by many of the blogs that aim to make money through non-personal content. I know many people who had and have different online diaries for different reasons. Many people would simply abandon one online diary for the other, as the concept of deleting online accounts was not considered as important by many people in the mid-90’s.

   Among the other things that online diaries have evolved into, blogs are the new normal craze now. Many people get more excited about having a blog instead of getting excited of what they want to achieve and what they can achieve with a blog. Online diaries have evolved into many things including blogs, networking sites, and more. LiveJournal can probably be considered an evolved example of personal diaries.

   Blogs are thriving, and are continuing to get stronger everyday. According to Technorati, more than 70 millions online blogs existed as of April 2007.

4. Chat and instant messaging accounts

   Instant messaging started mainly during the 2nd half of the 90’s, and to this day is very popular. Instant messaging accounts allow people to instantly chat with someone online. In the 90’s, people used to lure their friends into using ICQ to keep in touch. Slowly, Yahoo Messenger, AIM and MSN Messenger [now called Windows Live Messenger] brought more popularity to the entire instant messaging arena.

   Instant messaging itself got popular because of Internet Relay Chat [IRC]. IRC allowed people to chat instantly and live, and thus allowed them to communicate a bit faster than e-mail, if the people involved were online and using an IRC program at the same time. IRC evolved into different kinds of instant messaging, and instant messaging itself evolved and divided into voice chats, webcam conferences, live chat via e-mail accounts such as in Gmail, and more. In some ways, IRC itself can be considered an evolution of e-mail.

   Instant messaging accounts and online chats are also thriving and getting more popular everyday. At this moment, for the first time in internet history, a growing number of online people are using instant messaging more than e-mail.

5. Networking sites, which include social networking sites

   The latest, youngest and biggest craze right now is to open a social networking account. MySpace, twitter, facebook, linkedin, Bebo and many other networking and social networking sites came out with a big bang at different times during the last 5 years. As of last week, MySpace had over 200 million accounts. If it is assumed that each of those 200 millions accounts is owned by a unique individual, 200 millions MySpace members are almost 1/3rd the size of the entire U.S. population. Many people have multiple accounts on different networking sites, and many people simply delete their online networking accounts so that they can start afresh with new accounts.

   Networking sites are very strong right now, attracting more and more members everyday. At the same time, networking sites are also in their infancy sage. Social networking sites are the least experienced players in the entire online arena compared to the other 4 types [e-mail, guest books, online diaries and instant messaging accounts]. In many ways, networking sites can be considered children of concepts like Yahoo Groups and the original Usenet groups, now part of Google groups.

   The trend of opening networking sites in huge numbers started recently, and is in full force right now, gaining more momentum. It is happening and evolving live as you read this.

There you have it. Listed above are 5 trends of opening up 5 different kinds of accounts. These 5 services have had a historical trend of attracting a crowd that focused hysterically on opening new accounts. E-mail is the oldest and longest running of such trends, and networking sites are the youngest of the bunch.

Can you think of any trend from the above or any other trend you yourself may have been, or are, involved in? Do you have any questions or comments? Please let me know.

Thanks for reading.

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Take the online interaction allowed through social networking. More and more people are interacting online because they do not know how to interact with people in the offline world. That is both good and bad. It is good because it allows everyone to have an equal chance of meeting new people; if you cannot find self respect from others in the offline world or cannot meet new people easily in the offline world, you can try to build your character and contacts in the online world. It is bad because online social networking sites give you interaction skills that make you treat other human beings as a bunch of online protocols.

Many people cannot apply the same online communication principles to the offline world

Many people can poke on Facebook but they do not know how to communicate occasionally offline. Many guys love adding beautiful random girls online on MySpace but they do not know how to make any kind of a friend in the offline world. Online, a guy or a girl tells the other one how much love exists between them through Orkut, but that same person does not know what love is without sex or money in the offline world. People who are good at telling the truth online through their social networking blogs and messages to other online contacts, are also usually good at lying about the same things offline and vice versa, because they simply do not know how to communicate in the offline world.

Many people love disagreeing with their virtual friends without any logic, yet the same people do not know how to deal with anyone disagreeing with them in the offline world. Many people know when to block and delete a friend from their online social networking account, yet those same people do not know when an offline friend is actually not a friend and should simply be ignored, and vice versa. People can talk about honesty and friendship online through a lot of philosophical words in order to impress, but in real life, one can end friendship over sex, a dollar, a movie ticket, a disagreement, stubbornness or even food. Similarly, other people can talk about honesty and friendship in the online world in a very simple manner, yet they cannot help but complicate the same things in the offline world.

Why? Many people not know how to keep in mind all the different variables involved when communicating in the offline world, including the variable of being selfless sometimes.

Are online social networking sites so easy to use that people are deleting their own common sense?

I wonder if, at least for some people, the online social networking sites are making them better at portraying an illusion of communication online, yet making those same people clueless as to how to respect others and how to be considerate to others when it comes to socializing and interacting with other people in the offline world.

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Good things:

Yesterday, I added an old friend of mine on MySpace to my MySpace account. We have not talked for almost 7 years for reasons I cannot remember, so I am not sure if she will add me as her friend, or if she will freak out and say “Who the heck is Bes? Gonna block this psycho!@!@!@!@!” That is a benefit of using MySpace. Not the blocking part, but the finding old friends part.

Also, you can keep in touch with friends through different things including MySpace Instant Messaging. You can also become part of the school and university groups, rate your professors too.

Bad things:

One of the flaws of using MySpace is relying on a service that is not reliable and something which does not have that many features. Spam and scamming MySpace messages haunt MySpace users. Many porn and dating services are creating fake profiles to lure unsuspecting and maybe desperate people in. Also, many psychos and stalkers are on MySpace, probably tracking different users for whatever reasons.

On top of that, MySpace is becoming more and more of an advertising network where more focus is being put on bringing ads to the users instead of adding features or building MySpace from scratch on many levels to make it more user friendly. I think Facebook learned a lot from MySpace, which is good for Facebook, and uncertain for MySpace.

What do you think of MySpace? Do you like, or would you like to use MySpace?

Some people do not use MySpace to find new people, but to simply keep in touch with people who already have MySpace, and to keep in touch with people who only want to keep in touch through MySpace. So, do you like using MySpace? Do you have, or plan to use MySpace?

Thank you for reading.

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For some people, a blog about relationships may do better if the author’s relationship status is shared with the readers. Some people may want to be open through their online presence, so listing their relationship details may appear to be necessary on their blogs or comments. Similarly, some people may want to list your relationship status on places like MySpace or Facebook because they may simply want to be open, or they may want to meet other people to have some kind of a relationship with, like solely friendship or sometimes dating too.

Do you like revealing your relationship status online?

Do you like telling others online whether you are single, married, divorced, engaged or something else through your blog, comments or on social networking profiles?

Please let me know what you think. Thank you.

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1. Someone asks you to comment on their blog because they comment on your blog
2. Someone asks you to help them with their blog because they helped you with yours
3. Someone asks you to guest blog for them because they guest blogged for you
4. Someone asks you to look at their content, like proofreading or video editing, because you asked them in the past to help you too
5. Someone asks you to promote their blog because they helped you promote yours

So, do you think you are in blog debt? Do you owe someone online something because of asking them favors or for their help?

Please let me know. Thank you for reading.

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The hotlink blocking code is case sensitive

Originally, I had the following code in my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?MySpace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

The first line turns on the condition engine. The 2nd line checks for any site with the domain MySpace.com, and the 3rd line tells the server to show an image called “nohotlink.jpg” to any site mentioned in line 2. Even with this code, the 2nd MySpace user was still able to link to the picture of George Romero with glasses without any problems, as shown below:

After testing different things, I realized the image in question had a capital extension, JPG, instead of a lower-case jpg. On Unix servers, this matters. I went ahead and rewrote my code in the .htaccess file to include capitalized alphabets also:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?MySpace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|JPG|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

That did the trick. The 2nd user was now blocked from hotlinking also. I have yet to try the [NC] clause to the 3rd line above also. The NC variable means no case, meaning the server should treat both uppercase and lowercase letters for the words mentioned in the above code.

Avoid the hotlink blocking loop

I soon realized an issue with my above code. If a MySpace page links to an image, it will be blocked and shown the nohotlink.jpg file instead. However, the nohotlink.jpg file itself is a jpg image file and will be blocked also, sending the servers into a loop where MySpace servers will keep asking for the jpg file and my server will keep rejecting such requests. Such an indefinite loop is not good.

I went ahead and renamed my nohotlink.jpg file to the extension .jpe which would solve the loop problem. A jpe extension file works flawlessly, just like a jpg file. All you have to do is save any file to the jpg format and rename it to jpe yourself. I ended up with the following code in the end:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?MySpace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpeg|jpg|JPG|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpe
[L]

That covered all the image extensions I would want to use, and the nohotlink image file has an extension, jpe, which is not being used in the condition in the 3rd line above.

You can use a custom image to show to hotlinkers

The nohotlink.jpe image is something that will now be displayed on all MySpace profiles which hotlink to my images without my permission. I got this idea first when Stacee commented on my post from 2006 called “MySpace, hotlinking, and site gallery” in which I talked about the same topic. I followed up on Stacee’s idea and created the following image that will now be seen by all MySpace hotlinkers:

Following are the two images of the two profiles who are hotlinking, and how I have stopped their hotlinking by serving the above alternate image instead:

Thanks Stacee. I think that is a good way to let people know what is happening and also have free advertising at the same time. What do you think? So far, I am not aware of any of my friends and contacts who are hotlinking to my images. My friends and contacts have permission to hotlink to my images after they let me know.

Three important things I realized due to MySpace hotlinkers

I have realized three things from this:

1. Naming all image extensions in the same case is important.
2. Checking access logs regularly is important.
3. Stopping hotlinkers and stopping the trend of illegal hotlinking is important. Many MySpace users assume it is all right to link to images on other sites without permission. MySpace users: hotlinking to images without permission is not a good thing. It is illegal, not allowed, banned, bad, evil, and weird.

What is your opinion on this? I wonder if I should mention the urls of the MySpace profiles that hotlinked to my images.

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Yesterday, I blocked the direct linking of any image on this site from any Myspace account. Until such hotlinkers turn 18 and make money on their own, I was guessing they could learn how to use an online picture service now or ask their parents for an increase in their allowance in order to buy some hosting space. Any of my contacts can email me or simply link to an image and let me know; I don’t mind any of my friends linking to images here.

Earlier this morning, I decided to upgrade the local gallery on this site also, since I’d saved, theoretically, a lot of bandwidth that could’ve been wasted by Myspace hotlinkers. I somehow managed to wipe off all the picture albums from the server. I still don’t know how it happened, so I’m guessing it’s because of me getting way too old. Of course, the deletion of the gallery also fixes the issue of hotlinking on a bigger level; no image to hotlink to. I’ve backups of all the pictures on my computer, so I’m going to wait for a while to see if I should move everything to Flickr or keep everything locally on the site.

Moving on from Myspace hotlinkers and picture galleries to San Francisco: Here’s a picture I took while waiting outside a clothing store called “After the Quake - Shopping Zone”, near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. The two guys on the right are resting on two statues and waiting for their families to come out. The guy in the center has the famous Boudin Bakery shopping bag on the floor. The guy on the left was hanging around, waiting for someone too.

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