CAM: The Game + CAM: The Second Game

[th3()ne]

Five years ago, when there were far less people on the Internet than there are today, people were wary and skeptical about forming virtual relationships. The fact remains that online, it is very easy to create a character or persona very much different from you. One cannot be completely sure if the people they befriend in chatrooms are who they claim to be. As the years went by, the population of Internet users grew, and new softwares and innovations made online interaction easier and more convenient. The latest and most popular to date is Friendster, which was created by Jonathan Abrams, an engineer and entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, and launched in March 2003. Friendster took the Philippines by storm on July and got anyone with access to the computer so addicted to it that reports say Friendster been growing at 20% per week since then (Smalla). Because of its ability to build friendships through “friend-of-a-friend” referrals, Friendster makes online interaction more personal and easier to carry onto the offline world than other forms of online communication.

[th3()ne]

that shit sucks.

[Matyuv]

Yep.

[Matyuv]

A Conversational Network is the most personal of all four because introductions are made through actual communication instead of just a profile or a list of interests. The medium of Conversational Networks are weblogs or blogs, which is a journal published on the Internet that contains a mixture of what is happening in a person’s life as well as the latest web trends. Blogs are updated regularly and can be maintained even by people with little technical knowledge through the use of a program or script. What happens is that a person read someone’s blog, and then gets a general idea of the author based on what he or she writes in the blog. One can even participate in someone’s blog by adding comments on their entries. Bloggers—those who own and write in blogs—have the choice to ignore their readers or reciprocate by reading and placing comments on the blogs of their readers. Then they can develop a more personal relationship through e-mails, chat, or an eyeball, a term used for people from the Internet who meet face-to-face for the first time.