My Weblin Experience - Take 1

After reading a story about netvibes throwing a party at the TechCrunch site, I decided to go check it out.  Since this isn’t a post about netvibes, I’ll just describe the site as a sorta Yahoo-like customizable page where you have all of your RSS feeds, etc.

The thing I wanted to discuss was my experience with my Weblin avatar.  For those of you that don’t know what it is you can do a search on my site or google, or just go check out Weblin. The experience was interesting to say the least.  On the Netvibes site I noticed two other Weblin Avatars kinda walking around.  Since this was my first experience seeing another Weblin Avatar outside of the weblin homepage I decided to spark up a conversation.  I said hello to both weblins.  One responded by yawning, the other, we’ll call Gizmo opened up a private chat box. I started the conversation asking about the netvibes site. “How do you like it?  What can you do here?  Do you have a Netvibes account?, etc.”  It was a typical conversation about his or her experiences with netvibes. 

We then starting discussing Weblin, and our experiences so far with it.  Since I didn’t really interract with anyone until then, I didn’t really have much to tell.  But I can tell you now, this initial “non-test” experience brings up some interesting points.

1. I learned early that Gizmo was an eleventh grader.  Now I KNOW that he or she shouldn’t be able to talk with me, being a stranger. 
2. Being on different sites with other Weblin users gives you more relevant topics to cover.  I would imagine that being on the CNN business site with other Weblin users would probably yield a different discussion (when asked what to do on netvibes, Gizmo responded something like “well, there’s chess”.
3. It was nice to talk with one user on the website, I can only imagine the insanity that might occur if there were many weblin users on the CNN page with a controversial issue and multiple differing opinions.  It would literally be complete anarchy.  And just imagine people with different ethnic backgrounds colliding.
4. The little Avatar makes chatting and messaging much more fun.
5. You don’t really talk with Friends using Weblin, the tool is more used for meeting new, and hopefully, interesting people.

I’m not ready to give up my Yahoo, Google, or AIM messaging clients, but using Weblin can definitely be a new, fun, and engaging activity. I just hope they can address the issues related to privacy, ethical behavior, social divide, age appropriateness.

Posted by Rick Garcia in Social Media, Instant Messaging