Yes, you have to be someone's friend on all three sites, as far as I know, to leave a comment/testimonial/wallpost. What I mean is that the user has to approve a testimonial on Friendster before it appears on the site. So if we are friendsters, and I want to leave you a testimonial, I write it but then you have to *approve* it in order for it to go on your profile page. Otherwise it just sits in queue waiting for you to approve/reject it. So, presumably on Friendster you wouldn't be able to leave public messages posthumously because the person you are writing to/about is unavailable to approve the comments, so they never go public. On Myspace, you can change settings so that comments must be approved by you before they appear, but I think the default is that they appear without having had been approved; from my experience as a user this is the setting most people choose. I haven't actively used Facebook, but as far as I know you also don't have to approve posts for them to appear public. The fact that only people who are already established as "friends" can comment is also an interesting one in terms of eulogizing (not to make this discussion very morbid, but...), as it effectively seals one's network at time of death (well I suppose death itself does that) and so who gets to comment at this memorial site depends on who established themself as the deceased's "friend" in this particular way. All of this, of course, depends on no one else having the information to access someone's account (as Barry mentioned, this might not be the case) in order to edit it. But I've often wondered how the sites themselves deal with death of members - can family get in touch with them and ask that their pages be shut down? Someone who knows more about the three systems (and others) might correct me if I'm wrong! Lauren On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 15:20:24 -0500 andrea baker <bakera@ohiou.edu> wrote:
Lauren, hi, I just wondered, when you said: At 11:01 AM -0800 11/29/05, air-l-request@listserv.aoir.org wrote:
On a design note, it's interesting that sites like Facebook and Myspace enable this kind of discourse by providing "comments" or "wall posts" that don't have to be approved or moderated by the user whose profile it is - whereas this wouldn't be possible on Friendster because users have to approve testimonials before they appear.
Lauren
Were you sure or did I misinterpret? My observation of myspace suggests that people have to be "friends" of the person to post comments. Is that just an option, or a feature of the place? Also, in the linked article, only the friends commented on the person in Facebook, I believe. Would you elaborate? Interesting stuff, in any case.
thanks, andee
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---- Lauren Squires Linguistics Program University of Virginia *** http://polyglotconspiracy.net http://sociocmc.blogspot.com