Advogato, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Flickr, Linkedin, helpmeee!!

"The concept of social networks is not new, because even back in the bad old ASCII days we had Usenet, Fidonet, Bulletin Board Services, MUDs, chatrooms, and so on. It was wonderful-- for twenty bucks a month to get online I could talk to people all over the planet. Facebook, MySpace, and so on are the natural evolutions of those early text-based social networks. Now they're all glitzy, script-and graphics-heavy, full of annoying ads and spam, and new generations of users who faint at the sight of a command prompt. But this new generation are remarkably bold at sharing intimate personal details and humiliations in detail and in color. It's like those garrulous strangers who pester people at bus stops with gory details of their sex and medical histories discovered it was much more efficient to spread vast doses of TMI online."

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