26th April, 2010

Out to win a popularity contest

Posted by Navin Harish - No Comments

A friend on Facebook is not really a friend. A friend is someone who has spent considerable time with you in School/College/Work. A friend is someone who will pick you up from the airport even if it is at 2 am. A friend in someone who will let you sleep in his living room if you happen to visit the city. Very few of your online friend will do any of this for you because they hardly know you.

In such a scenario why do we feel proud to have a growing friend list on Facebook or Orkut. Why do we set out to beat our friends in a race to have more friends.

If I have 10000 friends on Facebook and it doesn’t realize to anything tangible except for Farmville and Mafia wars updates, I am not interested in it. I am okay with having half a dozen friend who are really my friends.

There are a couple of entries on the blog of Jeffrey Zeldman that I’d like to link. First is Stop chasing followers and the second is Like Buttons Falling From the Sky

Talking about Zeldman, he is the guy who taught me the virtues of standard compliant Markup. All I know about XHTML and CSS was learned by reading article in a site run by him – A List Apart and by looking the source code on his sites.