It was only a matter of time before the pinkies went up along with the gates. Social Networking may have egalitarian roots, and the masses can gather at the public pool if they want – if you want into certain places, you’ll have to bring your Members Only jacket.
I’m just kidding about the jacket. Nobody’s worn one of those since 1989.
I suppose, if you’re in one of the members-only social networks profiled by Businessweek, that MySpace is now considered steerage. But I also guess it was an inevitability. You can’t have the Masters of the Universe conversing where everyone can see them, now can you?
InMobile.org, for example, is made up of 900 wireless executives, most likely talking about ways to defeat the Net Neutrality and wireless spectrum arguments. Director level or above only, but you don’t have to deal with those annoying friend requests that make it into your inbox no matter how many times you’ve marked them as spam.
(Somebody tell Tom to tell these people to stop bothering me; I didn’t even fill out my profile or use a real name. And somebody tell Google that if I report MySpace spam a hundred times, I expect it to be spam forever; and why can’t GMail recognize when a message isn’t in roman letters?)
But my favorite is the Diamond Lounge. In addition to the wicked hypnotic diamond on the homepage, they’ve only accepted 100 out of 7000 applications. Yes, very cosmopolitan that Diamond Lounge, enough so that if you get in, you’ll instantly adopt a Thurston Howell III accent and start calling your wife “Lovey.”
I give it six months before somebody turns in a lame movie script about a college dropout that fakes his way into the place, just like its 1987 again.
