Staking Out the Virtual Homestead

So… I’ve been on Facebook for a while, and MySpace, and I even had a Twitter account a while back, but it all really paled in comparison to having my own domain, my own .com where I could do as I pleased. I have that, of course, in bigsimon.com and a dozen other domains that I use for my personal online playground, but no blog is an island. That’s right, this is the internet, the last three letters of which are short for “network”, and what is a network without some kind of interconnectivity? To that end, I’m working at integrating all of my online presences. I’m not entirely sure how it’s going to work, but so far, things seem to be going well.

I remember when Facebook was new, and it was exclusive. You either had to be in a school that was using it, or part of a company who had access. I had neither, though I did manage to slip in under their radar once by faking it. As far as I’m concerned, Facebook is the Holy Grail of social networking sites. None of the gaudy graphics of MySpace, plenty of applications (that you can either use or ignore, at your discretion), connections with longtime friends and former schoolmates you might otherwise not have been able to find. It’s a veritable cornocopia of community goodness. With the introduction of usernames on Facebook, I grabbed “bigsimon”, which means you can find me at facebook.com/bigsimon now. As of right now, my posts get plastered to my Facebook page by virtue of a newsfeed, but I’m looking for more ways to integrate.

Twitter is one of those oddball web applications. Microblogging, they call it, the ability to pass along little 140-character-or-less messages to a group of friends who are following you, and to follow others who are doing the same. I had a hard time getting into it with my first go, but now that I’ve got it tied to both this blog and Facebook, I can post a “tweet” (it sounds so… unmanly!) on my sidebar here and it goes to Twitter, then onward to Facebook, since the two of them are tied together. If you want to add me as a friend on Twitter, you can find me at twitter.com/bigsimonproject. (I was a little disappointed – someone else got the name “bigsimon”, so I had to settle for something longer.)

And then there’s MySpace. I’ve had a MySpace account for a few years now, but I rarely use it. Why? I don’t know… it seems more disorganized, less about who you are and more about how flashy you can make your page. Or something. Maybe it’s just because, like Twitter, I was forced to take a username I really didn’t want to use there. Or maybe it’s because MySpace has become synonymous with drunk teenagers and midlife crisis men trolling for underage girls. Either way, for the time being you can find me at myspace.com/zenvious, though I’m hoping to change that soon.