Extra Credit: Social Software

I am so not tech-savvy, and never have been. I was one of those play outside and ride bikes kids. My family got a computer pretty early, around 1988 or so. I was never too into it because I didn’t understand it and I didn’t play video games, unlike my brother. (Or maybe that was why I never got into it, my brother never got off the computer...) I never knew what "social software" was until I did the reading. Now, I understand what it is and what took me away from the real world for a year or two. When I was in sixth grade, my best friend came across this program online called "SPLIT." It was a bunch of people between ten and twenty years old, who just chatted online. It was the first time I ever used "LOL" or "BRB" because I had never heard of those things before. I had never really been online for leisure. Back then it was really like cyberspace because it was space-it was a computer connected to a telephone line where you could send words out to another telephone line.
There were no logos or images on SPLIT, it was just a black screen with green writing and people had usernames. We would talk all day, and I remember being so excited to get home from school so I could go talk to my friends. I "fell in love" for the first time talking to a guy named GAMER, haha. We would all get to know eachother and sometimes meet up in groups so we could put a face to a username. This is the first social software I ever used, as far as I’m concerned. I think it is a really neat tool and it has taken us far since the 1980's. I didn’t really have that many friends because I was so shy, so where else could I have met 50 people and been able to be myself? Where else can you socialize for hours with people your age when you don’t have a car, too young to ride the bus, it’s rainy outside, or the people live far away? Nowhere and that is why this social software has become a hit.