Profile Sites, Avoid them?
Profile sites are perhaps one of the many trends taking the Internet by storm but still, they have their advantages and disadvantages.
Profile sites allow you to set up your own profile page for people to view and leave comments. Examples of profile sites include Friendster, Myspace, Youtube and Yahoo 360. New ones are popping out every now and then, and there are probably about hundreds of them, but the most popular one are still the few mentioned above and maybe some new ones coming up.
Profile sites are sometimes very addictive, to certain people. Take Friendster for example. I see my friends going there everyday. Their term for this activity is "Check Friendster". They check it more regularly compared to their emails. Getting addicted to this kind of stuff is a serious problem. Lots of other useful activities could have been done using the time taken to update the pages and read people's blogs and chain messages at Friendster.
Profile sites are perhaps one of the many trends taking the Internet by storm but still, they have their advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages are:
o They eat up your time (As stated above)
o Most activities there are not useful, or at least not as useful as other activities that you could possibly do with your time spent there.
However, the advantages are:
o They let you communicate with friends (though this can already be done using other means like cellphones or email)
o They provide fun, but only to a certain extent.
o They sometimes allow media-sharing. And this might be the most advantageous of the advantages. Youtube and Myspace provides video sharing, so you can watch videos. Projectplaylist provides music sharing.
Considering the advantages and disadvantages, the scale still slants towards the disadvantage side. Time is one of the most valuable resource that mankind can have and these sites provide lots of means to waste them.
So, should profile sites be avoided? I would not discourage using profile sites though. Use them for what you need. You need to have an online profile, go there and upload you photos and insert details. Then people can see your profile. If you need to upload or share some videos, upload them and that's it. The rest, think to yourself before doing them: "Is this necessary?" If the answer is no, then log out of there and go back when you need to. And if your work intertwines with playing around with the functions of the site and keeping in touch with lots of people from these profile sites like Friendster or Myspace, and you earn something from doing that, by all means go ahead, as your time would not be wasted there.
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Posted on 2007-06-27 [Wed] 08:46 with 6394 hits