g l o s s o l a l i a : the gift of tongue

There are so many social networking sites out there now, that we don't even bother trying to keep up anymore. And the one that started it all - well, with it constantly being down or running at a snails pace, and their zealous deletion of any profile that wasn't "real", who even cares about that site these days. There are so many others that have expanded on the basic idea and made it much more user friendly with more photocentric features, blogs, forums, chat and even CSS customization of user pages. (Although, MySpace has gone a bit too far on that front and the result has been some of the the most hideous, browser-crashing profile pages on the planet)

In apparent response to the abandonment of our profile, this ego stroking message appeared in our inbox:

You're our favorite subscriber! Seriously. I know we here at Friendster shouldn't play favorites, and our chief operating officer (he's the old guy in the office) told us not to do this, but seriously, you just totally rock. The way you reconnect with old friends. The way you've figured out just how small and interconnected the world really is. The way you discovered people with the same interests as you. We suspect you've even gotten a date out of Friendster, or that if you didn't, you could have if you needed to. Easy. With one of those three suspiciously hot people who keep popping up right above your friends list. For other people, we just use those pictures as cruel, aspirational temptation. But for you, they're totally getable. We even made Friendster much faster just for you. But hey - don't tell anyone we told you all of this. That old guy in the office will just start lecturing us again and pulling out charts and graphs and PowerPoint displays. He's such a loser. Thanks, Your friends at Friendster

Only one day into the July Fourth holiday weekend found me looking for an entertaining, potentially destructive, but ultimately useless project to stave off boredom. So I turned to the internet. Natch.

There are more than enough websites offering advice on anything from buying a digital camera to a how-to for FtMs on crafting a home made SoftPack.

One of the most interesting How-To sites i stumbled across however, was How To: By You. Part blog, part forum - the premise of HTBY is that every few weeks a how-to question is posted, to be answered by the readers via comments.

Unfortunately, a lot of the newer entries are cluttered with comment spam, but this entry gave me more than enough pointers on how to spend my afternoon.