Xanga Profiles: let’s turn people into 2D searches, and a small DDR update

  Yeah, give me a blog and suddenly I’m a chatty bastard   Two posts in a day is probably rediculous, but I had a serious rant about Xanga.  So far I’ve been pretty happy using Xanga – it beats the hell out of LiveJournal (well, when I used it a couple years ago – haven’t been back to see how it works these days), and at least the editor it compatible with my Mac + Firefox combo rather than using some idiot IE only functionality.

Then I noticed the announcement for upgraded profiles (in beta) and decided to use it.  Somehow, this managed to tick me off a bit.  They made a ton of entry areas you can fill out ranging from music to food to games.  Sound good?  Not to me.  To me this helps to reduce a person to a 2D entity, instead of the deep personality that most people have (note I say most   I mean, something as simple as the music questions are enough to set me off.

I love music.  Even something as simple as what’s your favorite genre is hard to answer – I LISTEN to Classic Rock most often, but, I like it equally with Modern Blues (there is no blues station here), heavy metal (kinda ditto – T95 used to sort of be there, but, has long since moved on to a different sort of mix), Contemporary Jazz, multiple forms of Techno, and… well, I think you get the idea.  Favorite lyrics?  I stopped after I listed 3 Rush songs (with snippets from the lyrics.)   There are just way too many.

But if I answered the first question with just Classic Rock and the second with Rush’s “Closer to the Heart”, you’d assume I was just some 30somethings who could care less about modern music.  *SIGH*  In other words, I think this misses the point about blogs in the first place – giving people the ability to share info, events, and about themselves in a way that others online could actually get to know them a bit.  Now, just click the profile to reduce the person to a simple database field entry, and you know all you need to know about ’em, right? 

But the real telling part about the new profile system is the name “Network Manager”.  AH!  So the idea here is that not only can you reduce people to database entries, but later you’ll be able to “network” with others by simply filering – IE, “TECHNO not OLD FARTS WHO LIKE CLASSIC ROCK” to find new people to hang around.

For the most part, I’m a technologist – but somedays I see how it’s application can make our life a lit less diverse and more cliquish than it was before.  How long before we get to the point that we start filtering the people we meet online even futher, to the point where we only have discourses about things we like, since there’s never anything to debate?  Nothing to see two different sides of an issue on?  You thought some people’s xenophobia was bad before, wait until they isolate themselves this way.  Bah.  I’m sure I’m just grumbling over nothing, but it does honestly seem to have a bit of a scary 

potential for the future.  While I’m not a people person, I like my diversity in my life, and I’d like it to stay that way 

I moved the DDR setup – no longer with Agents of Comics employees have to fear the threat of falling plaster.  It’s now setting over top of one of thier offices, and should probably deaden the “thump, thump, thudthump” a bit when someone is playing 

Now one of the things I have to figure out is the “perfect” distance from the screen to the pads.  I’m using the old pads, and the 32″ monitor (ye gods I love that thing) is setting on a table.  After the other pads are built, I’ll build a nice cabinet for the montor.  But for now I just need to find the distance from the monitor so I can get a good idea where it all needs to set, then we the pads are down I can build the back and front bars for it.  If anyone is reading this – drop by and play for 10 or 15 minutes to give me an idea what the average for what distance people like is (I’m sure not everyone is going to like the same distance, so it’s going to have to end up somewhere in the middle.)

Davis, Gamer Zone