Singularity on the Plane

Friendster. Everyone talks about it, everyone’s in it. However, I thought it was rather useless so I never bothered to make an account. Well, until one day my friend (Firdaus IIRC) pestered me or lets say, forced me to death. ‘It won’t do no harm’, or something like that. Obviously not with a grammatically-unsound (or so they say) construct such as the double negative.

So, to spice things up a bit, I decided to make it a pet social experiment. ‘Let’s see how many friends I can get if I just accept friend invitations…’, I thought. That means all my friends on my friendster list asked me to be friends first. Well, except for one, the almighty guitar kamisama, my high school mate, Andre (who can resist not adding him as a friend?). Right now I have 62 friends. Quite popular, I reckon.

But I jumped from my chair, unliterally, hearing a japanesepod101 podcast talking about Mixi, a friendster-like site but in Japanese. Naturally I was interested to join, as I’m currently a Nihongo student.

Mixi’s registration system is invitation-based, much like the beta gmail (right now gmail should be around version 3). They say that it would allow them ‘to create a comfortable place’, or to paraphrase it, ‘to make you suffer finding someone who owns a Mixi account’.

Getting someone to invite wasn’t that hard for me. Well, if you count several days as ‘not that hard’, that is. On the podcast, Peter and the gang told that one only need to ask them. So I visited the forum and appropriately posted on an already-existing ‘I want a Mixi account’ thread. But it’s a sticky thread so it’s always on the top which unfortunately made it less glaring if a new person posted there. n days passed without a reply.

I was sure I would get a reply by just directly mailing the staff or PMing people that gave mixi invites on that thread, but at that point I couldn’t wait longer and wanted a more real-time response. So I visited the place where one can easily encounter a random Nihonjin and chat with them, irc.2ch.net#japanese (and they actually speak English there if you’re still on your kanas)! a_a was kind enough to invite me, and long story short I’m now a Mixi citizen!

For me, the registration process was relatively easy to follow. The menus are also fully readable. However, the personal content, now that’s where the fun begins! I already found someone using a never-before-encountered non-ministry-approved kanji for eel 鰻 (unagi) on his ‘favorite food’ list.

If you need a Mixi invite, and can assure me that you’re not using it solely for the purpose of finding random Japanese girl pics, I’ll gladly confer it.

Tags: 2ch, friendster, mixi, social networking

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 10:36 am by Agro Rachmatullah and is filed under Japanese, Life, Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.