I've got a Twitter account, though I don't get much use out of it. Truth be told, I've always treated it as a sort of interactive RSS feed: a stream of websites and journos advertising their latest pieces, interspersed with the occasional witty repartee from roustabouts. Ditto for Facebook. Back in college it was my social calendar, a place to organize events and then post pictures afterwards—a few years down the road I'm loathe to start mass-defriending folks, but I can't imagine those guys and gals I chatted up between keg stands are keen on discussing the minutiae of GPUs or Pokémon training.
Both social networks are kind of a bust for getting my conversation on. But what if there were a site specifically designed to draw like-minded folk into its social web, centered around a particular niche—say, video games? A place where internet denizens with like-minded tastes could congregate and discuss things that interest them? Good news everyone, there is: Reddit, NeoGAF, Digg, uhh…Google Plus.
And now, F!rst. It's a fledgling, mobile-only community for gamers that aims to—actually, that's irrelevant. Social networks don't need a mission statement, just a community that rallies around them, offering debate and breathing life into their virtual halls. Like most fledgling social environments, F!rst offers that intriguing feeling of newness born of being a place that isn't yet overrun with advertisers and trolls, a spot for the dedicated few to share stuff they think is cool or shoot the breeze beneath the general banner of video game and video game culture.
If it's lucky (read: successful) that won't last—such is the nature of the Internet, as money flows where the eyeballs are. But for a brief moment a new destination has arisen that's generating interesting dialogue, fomenting a new community that has yet to succumb to memes, self-promoting writers and websites hoping for pageviews or thinly-veiled advertorials. Right now, F!rst is pretty cool.
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon