Social Networking and Illnesses

July 18th, 2008

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by someone on MySpace telling me about a new social networking site for women who suffer from endometriosis (as well as their spouses/partners). It’s called We Are Endo.

It’s actually a really great site. It’s really much like MySpace, with status updates, groups, blogs, etc. The Boston-area Endometriosis Support Group disbanded so at least now I have a place where I can login and feel like I’m not alone. The blogs are useful too, because you can chronicle pain.

But then, at the same time, because it’s a site for an incurable disease, it can also leave me feeling a little hopeless.

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Tweet tweet?

July 2nd, 2008

I’ve been using Twitter lately. Part of me thinks it’s kind of stupid, but part of me enjoys it.

Well, that is, when it actually WORKS. It works about half the time when I try to use it. We’ve been using it at my part-time job to broadcast stuff such as coupons, and everything takes me quadruple the amount of time that it would if the site worked.

I wonder how long it will be before I lose patience and move on to another social networking tool. This reminds me of ICQ circa 1998 when it was down all the time. Everyone moved to AIM. Then in 2003, same thing happened with Friendster, and everyone moved to MySpace (and later, to Facebook)

As far as I can tell, Twitter has to make a choice…can they improve their service or are they going to quickly become passe as we move on to other Twitter-like social networking tools? How much time can we make for a service that doesn’t work a good portion of the time?

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