Monday, April 30, 2018

Bestuff - early social media

Thanks for everyone who read and enjoyed last weeks outdoor edition of the blog not least the pictures.
This week I'm going back a bit in time to around ten years ago before some of you were online even and looking at one site I loved in the before Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr were the social media of choice.
The main reason you join any kind of social media is to form connections with others,  in other words it's the cyber equivalent of face to face networking so you need to find thinks that link you to who share things in common.
The mainly British social media of choice in the 2000's was Friends Reunited that worked though connecting you to schools, colleges, university and workplaces to others who had connections to them.
Bestuff was an international site that did things in way that soon become more the norm.

Rather than looking at where you've been, it looked at what you liked such as favourite films, foods, pets, hobbies, dating likes and so on in groups created by users which you'd mark up as likes that added into a mosaic collection of your "Bestuff".
 New Stuff, new categories were listed you you could keep up and by going through categories you could find your "Bestuff" and share it.
It was a bit like a game where you'd go around looking for and creating things you'd share.
It's a bit like Tumblr where you look for thing you like, reblog and follow each other except it was a bit less high tech and didn't have the messaging sophistication.
There was a Friends section you could add those you shared the most stuff with and a messaging board and my best buddy on there is in that screenshot, Tribble, to whom we had keenly felt relationship between us.
It closed down after a period of graveyard languishing a few years back but part of my past includes this early social media so when I think  back to things when this blog was in its infancy, I do think of those days by the "Big Computer" on sites like that before joining Google Plus and Tumblr.
Of the two I'd say Tumblr is the busier by far and Google Plus is one of those things I file under was encouraged by a group of friends who seemed to want to leave Facebook but then decided freebees were worth more to them than better privacy and control of who you posted too and promptly left me on there as I refuse to do facebook. Actually I have two accounts but do wonder from time to time about scrapping one completely since I seldom use the other.

1 comment:

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    ReplyDelete