Friendster is out, facebook is in. In the past few weeks, facebook seems to grow exponentially around my circle of friends. Everyone is ditching friendster and signing up with facebook. I registered my facebook account two weeks ago and now I already have over 30 contacts. People even send messages in friendster to tell people they are switching to facebook. It is fair to say friendster is showing its age. The site is always slow and it lacks of features. Facebook is much more user friendly and the interface is quite intuitive. How the photo album supports tagging people’s name is really genius, highly recommended. It is only the matter of time before facebook overtake friendster, repeating how MSN overtake ICQ. I am pretty sure a few years, some better social networking site will comes in and out shine facebook. Then there will be another round of mass exoduses, everyone migrate their contacts from one site to another.
There is one thing about this kind of social network I love to hate or hate to love. Before everyone you ever known is connected by social network, whatever passed is passed. If you want to forget someone after you two’s circle of life drifted apart, normally you won’t hear any news from each other. Eventually the memory will be preserved under a dusty corner somewhere inside your brain. Now with these kind of massive social networks, that someone is just always a few click away. You may tell yourself you don’t want to and you don’t need to know anything about that person. But curiosity makes people click in and take a look how that person is doing these days. Is she happy? Has she find someone to take care of her yet?
Normally, people hate watching TV commercials. They will avoid watching commercials by pressing the fast forward button in recorded programs, change channels or go to the washroom in live programs. I can’t believe I watched nothing but commercials for almost half an hour today. I haven’t watched Hong Kong TV commercials for a long time. Although I watch TV programs from HK quite frequently, those program are usually commercial free. I am curious how the TV commercials in HK look like nowadays and what are the differences with those here in Canada. I downloaded a collection of HK TV commercials and watched it half-heartly this afternoon. Actually I am quite disappointed, out of the hundred or so commercials I watched, there are only a few good ones with a sense of humor or with artistic expression that is pleasant to watch. I always thought commercials in HK would be more interesting than those broadcast here. I guess commercials are just equally boring everywhere. Some commercials hire celebrities as speak persons, which I found quite this type of commercials often lacks substance and instantly turned me off. Ok, commercials with showering scenes by famous female stars are exceptions, but I still won’t buy those products because of the stars. Some commercials trying to be too informative, giving boring useless sales number to the audience so that they can forget in the next second. There is one clueless commercial featuring Chow Yun Fat with lots of weird visual imageries. It turns out to be the commercial for the new casino in Macau. No wonder the advertisement company can make an expensive commercial seems so meaningless, that is exactly the effect they want to archive. You can’t hard sell gambling in TV commercials. To my surprise, I found some ancient commercials from my childhood days still on air these days. The tag line of those commercials are part of the collective memories among people form different generations. Actually, I am more surprise those products are still in business. Who wants to by a product running an aging commercial?
What is a good life? I have been asking this question to myself lately. The definition of good life have different meanings to different people. Someone want to be rich and powerful, someone want to live simple and humble. At the end of the day, it comes down to the choice of life style. It is a known fact that happiness does not correlate with wealth. The pursuit of wealth may make other parts your life suffers. But on the other hand, money can fulfill many of your desires. One way out is to eliminate your wants like a Buddhist monk or convert your desires to intangible spiritual values that comes free like those religious people. It seems to me forgoing the wish for materials is an adjusted preference that people change their expectation when they realize they can’t achieve their original goal. Then they justify to themselves why the new goal is better than the old one by looking down on the things they once aspired to. I am turning middle age and I have done some reality check on myself. I know I can’t fulfill all my wants, so I have to discard some of them to keep myself in balance. I have decide what to keep and what to let go yet. But one thing is for sure, I won’t look down on the things I once like. I sacrifice some goals to archive some other goals. I should happy for those who can do what I can’t fulfill. The things I would look down on is those that I never had and never will have interest.
