Pownce makes me wish I had real friends.
I’ve been using Pownce for several days now and I have come to one conclusion. Pownce makes me with I had real friends. I mean, I have 129 “friends” on Pownce. That’s cool, right? Well, not really. I mean, those people aren’t really my friends. For all I know, Kevin Rose and Co. have designed an extremely intelligent artificial intelligence server that simply converses in a somewhat convincing way. These people don’t really know me and I don’t really know them. Let’s face it, if they were my real friends I wouldn’t have to use Pownce to talk to them. Pownce is essentially a large chat room to me, except I can step away at any time and nobody will care. That’s because none of my “friends” really care about me. I’m seeing a general trend with social networking. It seems like social networking is designed to allow people to have as many fake friends as they can possibly have. Thereby making them feel better about themselves when in fact they are just too lazy to go out and make real friends. Okay, so most people say that they use social networking sites to keep in touch with people. How? By posting what they are currently doing and soforth. This is great, but let’s face it, the people who are looking on those sites aren’t people you know that well because if you did, they would already know that stuff. Sure, you can post pictures there, but you can also post pictures on a picture website like Flickr, Zooomr, or Picasa. Those have much better image hosting options anyway. To make a long story short, the people on Pownce don’t care about me and I don’t care about them. Why would I invite my real friends to join when I already talk to my real friends by email, phone, or in person every day? I couldn’t tell you. I think the general trend for the United States is to become more lazy. Pownce is just helping us become lazy.
