Just lovely

Yeah, so this photo sharing, social network, web two point oh thingie? It's interesting to watch the dynamics of the networks. Take, for instance, my second Flickr spam (I deleted the first):

I deliberately didn't put that one on Flickr because doing so would just make it easy for my Flickr friends to click over to this guy. Since the friend who tell me they actually read this blog and the circle of friends who use Flickr are nominally disjoint, this guy is less likely to get traffic from my posting the image on my site instead of my Flickr photostream.

That said, this guy looks like he falls into the camp of "get as many contacts as I possibly can by adding everyone as a contact.". He has 4597 contacts at last count:

In as much as I really don't have photos that are that interesting, he's clearly not adding me as a contact for my amazing use of a digital camera.

I noticed a similar phenomenom at Orkut. I followed Bharat's example and made myself a fan of everyone who added me as a contact/friend. To my surprise, almost everyone I was a fan of listed me as a fan back. Even some people who I knew only peripherally from college.

It's another example of the strange (to me) social dynamic where if someone says something nice about you, you're more likely to think of them positively. Same situation where a person is more likely to notice and find attractive people he's been told are attracted to him first. An "Oh, you like me? Hey, I'll like you back." sort of thing.

I recently added a person I don't know personally to my contact list. I felt really uncomfortable doing it, but he has cool photos, and I like to view them in my contacts photostream page. The message I received suggests such is a reasonable excuse, but it was still weird. Except for that guy and other person who is a friend of a friend, I know all of my contacts.

After all, they're part of the Web Two Point Oh movement.

Doin' cool shit.