Do you friendster or facebook? (and the phrase of the day)

OKAY, so I was sitting just sitting here transferring photos from my camera phone into my computer but I realized I couldn't upload them into another photo set on Flickr because I'm a free account user. So not wanting to spend $25 a year just to get a Pro unlimited account, I searched through the site to find out if I could delete a set of photos without erasing them completely from my photostream. Of course, there was nothing on the FAQs page nor anything in the forums advising users of solutions or alternatives to this dilemma. (Of course if you've been a long-time Mac user like me, you know that anything owned by Yahoo as well as Yahoo itself sucks.)

Fortunately, some of the guys in the forum mentioned Facebook, the social networking site, which they said allowed unlimited photo posts. Hmmm...I thought that sounded cool, although I was still wary of the social networking phenomenon which had begun with the establishment of Friendster. I've been invited a lot of times by Friendster users to join the site, but for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how you could call someone a "friend" without actually meeting them face to face! I've read in some newspaper stories that some users had thousands and thousands of "friends!" Then one annoying guy I don't even know just kept on emailing me to view his profile, which I found creepy. So I didn't want to join that.

(Partying at the Two Seasons resort blessing, Nov. 17, 2007. From left: Teddy, Raoul, moi, and Jenny Peñaloza. More photos at Stella in Facebook.)

Anyway, to make the long story short, I joined Facebook. It seemed a better alternative as it seemed the entire world had already joined Friendster. I felt Facebook was "cozier", if that term even applies in the cyberworld.

So this is part real, part social experiment. I want to see how many of my real friends, contacts, and regular acquaintances would join Facebook and be my "friend." I found out that among my email contacts (Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail), there were a few who were already Facebook members. I restricted the invites to only people who were my actual friends, travel buddies, and fellow foodies, as well as a few people I was interested in knowing more after the initial contact in the real world. As of today, I have 10 Facebook friends from the Philippines, Bangkok, Northern Marianas, and the U.S.... not bad considering I just joined two days ago.

But as I plodded through the list of friends of my Facebook friends who had added me to their network, I've concluded that Filipinos are still a conservative lot. Most of the friends on their own lists were people they've worked with, people who they grew up with, or went to school with, or even current companions and colleagues at work. There were only few who appeared to have "friends" the Friendster-type. I don't know if it's because I belong to a more mature generation (my youngest Facebook friend is 25 I think) who are more protective of their privacy. Only one of them had about 125 Facebook friends on the list and I knew most of these people even vicariously. His friends were surely not from Timbuktu. (Of course the downside to this is I realized creepy Friendster guy is also a member of Facebook and is one of my Facebook friend's "friend." Kainis!)

Anyway, check out my photos from my vacation last weekend at Stella in Facebook. This is my first photo album and I'm still trying to get the hang of posting, poking, writing on walls and such. It's definitely a different experience worth exploring. Enjoy!

(P.S. A lot of my earlier photos are still posted on Flickr. You can check them out at Stella at Flickr.)

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RIDICULOUS HEADLINE OF THE DAY:

I just couldn't help but howl in laughter over this continuing saga between Manny Paquiao and Ara Mina. Hay naku, read on and forget the problems of this country for a minute!

Pacquiao tells Ara Mina: Ignore rumors about us.

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PHRASE OF THE DAY: Panty-quivering. To describe how a really hot guy makes a woman deliciously shiver down there just by his looks alone. Ex. Tony Leung, and that real yummy guy I met in Boracay. Oof! I invented this term and am patenting it starting today. So there.