Friendster has Died and well…Resurrected

Oh my god! Friendster used to be so popular 5-6 years ago and I didn’t know it has completely shut down as a social networking site and shifted to social gaming and entertainment website. I had to double check the webpage address to see whether I got the address correctly. Well I used to be an avid user of Friendster back in the earlier days before Facebook came and dominate the social networking websites. What hit me is that, all my messages and testimonials (comments) are gone. There were some really sweet testimonials that my friend has written for me and now it can’t be retrieve any more! I didn’t know that we could export all our information before it was close down. Well yea, because I just knew about it today.  Sources claimed that an e-mail has been sent out to all Friendster user accounts about the change and has asked us to export our information. Unfortunately I did not receive that e-mail even thought I’m still using the same e-mail address. Sad case.

Okay, enough with the sulking already. What actually struck me to go back to my Friendster account today was when Seth mentioned  how this course would be different if we were taking it 5 years ago. Well 5 years ago, internet wasn’t all that important to me. All I did on the internet was check my e-mail, played ICQ and was on Friendster most of the time. I didn’t really engage with the internet that much as my source of information was still books. I usually have two or three reference book for my Chemistry, Biology and Physic subjects. I guess most of my time was spent on studying and going for tuition and school’s extra curricular activities. It was indeed a different sort of world back then where internet wasn’t everything. Studying and getting an A was what matters to me the most.

However, if we were to look back three to fours ago when I finished my high school and started university, that was when I eat, sleep, breathe the internet. I no longer use the traditional thick dictionary to search up words I don’t understand but instead I used Google as a source for everything. I started to blog as well and I did get pretty interested in HTML. I did not create the whole layout of my blog back then but I would search up for pretty templates and edit the HTML from there. I would spend hours changing the colours of my font, hover links, sidebars and searching for widgets like live traffic feed and web counters just to spice things up on my blog.

I guess this Networked Media course back in 2006 would be a bit of a challenge as everything was still new and freshly starting out. Going through some of the earlier hypertext essay examples from students in 2006 and 2010, I could see that the layout and everything was basic and straight forward back in 2006. Meanwhile, in 2010, student works were starting to get more experimental and more advanced.