I’m going to take a stab at putting something on here every day. Honestly, I probably won’t follow through on this because I’ll find myself straining to have an opinion on extremely trivial and mundane bullshit.
Kind of like Classmates.com.
After oh, let’s say 5 years of being pestered by these bastards I finally decided to sign up for the minimal subscription to view the people who’d signed my profile or some such. Whee. I could have spent that $15 on all kinds of things that would have provided more gratification; like a dozen boxes of thumbtacks to roll around naked on. Yeah, I ended a sentence with a preposition, what.
TL;DR version: 4 of the 8 people who’d “signed” my profile page had absolutely no connection to me whatsoever. These people I assume are plants by Classmates.com that trigger the “Hey hey hey! You’ve got people who want to talk to YOU YOU YOU” type emails that have been spamming my inbox over the years. That might sound all “tinfoil-hat conspiracy-ish” to you, but having worked for two different Social Networking companies I have enough first-hand knowledge to know better.
As far as the other 4 go, 3 of which were people I had barely known and one was an Army buddy I still keep in touch with every so often. So Classmates.com was batting .150 for people I gave a shit about.
I did have an email from a girl (well, woman now I guess) who I vaguely remember running against for 8th grade student council president. We both lost, to the cute girl who promised in her campaign speech to get rid of detention hall and secure the lunchroom borders. Or something. What’s funny is that we actually had a back-room conference with the principal after her victory to confer about her unethical promises and pandering*. I really had no objections since I ran on a platform of “I get to stand up in front of the school and be a jackass for 5 minutes for my own personal amusement”.
Anyway…
So yeah, I certainly didn’t get my $15 worth out of Classmates.com. And to top it off, I was spammed with more goddamn offers for crap I didn’t need as a part of the sign-up process. What the hell? I was already giving you guys my fucking money, and you felt the need to try and squeeze more out of me?
Were I Gene Siskel I’d give Classmates.com one big, desiccated middle finger up for being a waste of bandwidth and the single biggest disappointment as far as Social Networking sites go. Hell, it’s the granddaddy of them all and had the potential to be what Facebook is today. Instead, it’s a festering pit of pop-ups, spam, and things we should leave behind.
*She’s probably working for Karl Rove now although I can’t be bothered to log back in to that site and find out.
