a funny thought occurred on the way to the toilet
May 11 '08
The Bottom Line I like pie.
"Epinions Coulda Been Facebook."
To most folks who are today most active on the site versus those of us tired bitter old farts who were here back in the golden days of penny-per-hit, such a claim seems as silly as saying "Lou Diamond Philips will have along and wonderful career!" or "this whole 'ARPAnet' project is a waste of time and money which will never amount to anything."
Tales turn twisty and tortured down the great river of time, and while it seems ludicrous to believe, there was once a time when the freewheeling social networking excitement now seen on MySpace and FaceBook was starting and growing on Epinions.
It's not even that far-fetched or tough to understand: if you think about how similar the "Web of trust" is to the FaceBook Friends function, you see how we once would find someone familiar from some other online frivolity -- a chat room, a discussion board, an email circle, something -- and then click on their Epi avatar to christen them "Trusted." When you found some cool new trusted friend, you'd often cruise down THEIR Trusted list and look for interesting or perhaps familiar names and personalities.
Online games? We did 'em -- from odd trivia quizzes to such silliness as "What JOANIE LOVES CHACHI Character Are You?"
Circles of friends and special purposes "clubs"? Oh, they were around, even if sometimes the brownshirts, vigilantes, and paste-eaters in some of these groups denied it.
A sense of community and camaraderie? Yeah, we had that, too -- this despite the best (ha!) efforts of Nirav "The Check Is In The Mail" Tolia and his gang of underaged execs... even though Epinions the company seemed hell-bent on turning the site into something kinda like Amazon... or maybe like Google... but perhaps a bit like Pets.com... or maybe yeah maybe kinda like [insert name of any of a hundred other now-failed and forgotten Web 1.0 darlings].
When I go to FaceBook today, I see pretty much what used to be most fun and cool about Epinions when I first signed on back in the wild and wooly days of 2000 (when we were all still living in caves and eating gathered fruits and nuts in the post-millenial wasteland wrought as a result of the Y2K Disaster... oh... yeah. Never mind...). I see people cavorting and playing and leaving comments to each other and posting odd bits of whimsy and supporting causes and positions and posting essays and testimonials and finding interesting new people and viewpoints and flavors of insight and an entire society built around the concept of the value of Individual Personality.
Those poor Epi-fools. Don't they realize that there's no value in such nonsense? That what people REALLY care about is half-baked poorly-worded overblown "reviews" of hairdryers, rental car agencies and catfood, all penned by anonymous folks terrified to death by the possibility that charm and charisma and personality might be hailed as relevant, useful and valuable.
And Happy Mother's Day, you weasels. ;-)
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prodigal B
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Epinions.com ID:
AggieBrett
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Member: Brett
Location: Katy, Texas (suburb west of Houston)
Reviews written: 47
Trusted by: 119 members
About Me:
I like gravel.
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