I came across a new site today that offers free chat rooms to it’s users. Naturally when I think “chat rooms” the first thing to pop into my head is AOL or even Yahoo for that matter but wireclub.com is basically taking the bull by the horns and attempting to stand out amongst the rest.This site comes across as more of a social networking establishment than it does a chat related website. It seems more like a myspace kind of a website than anything else, honestly. You can join one of the free chat rooms, start your own blog, create and join new clubs to make friends with similar interests. You can connect with your friends, organize parties, share thoughts and even meet the friends of friends on your list. There’s even a free dating service through into it as well.
I personally don’t involve myself with sites of this nature, not that I have anything against a site individually but I just don’t have enough time in the day to really sit down and use these sites to the best of their ability. I’ve beta tested on quite a few ‘up and coming’ social networking sites in my day and none of them really stood out to me as something different. You have a login with a picture, you can throw some random (rather ugly) CSS onto a profile template to make it unique and then from there you have the option of joining different clubs, getting involved on forums and building up huge ‘friends’ lists of people that you don’t even know.
See, I have this theory in life – some may agree and some don’t – if you talk to someone ONCE about something as dumb as answering a simple question, there’s no reason to list them as a friend. I don’t limit this to social networking sites, I’m also talking in regards to buddy lists on major chat programs like MSN, AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, etc. I’m aware of the fact that AOL has integrated the “Recent Buddy” option onto their program but this doesn’t mean that you have to abuse it. When you look at your buddy list and think “Who the heck is that?” then it’s time to do a clean out and remove all the names located under you.
Please, for the love of god, do not IM someone and say “Who are you?” then follow it up with “Why are you on my buddy list?” I can’t tell you how many times someone has added my name to their buddy list and then completely forgot who I was. If I meant to spoke to you at any time in the last decade of being online then naturally I would remember who you were because you’d be on my buddy list, only if our conversation was actually important enough to me for me to continue speaking with you. If you came across any one of my websites and thought “She’s cool, I should list her” or even better “She could probably help me with some site-related issues” then don’t forget the reason behind adding me, will you?