There are very few websites out there which I actually understand. Facebook, for example, never seems to work properly. mp3shits.com has nothing to do with musical bowel movement. And apparently there are loads of single girls in Croydon looking to meet me.

Tumblr is an interesting one. As far as I can tell, it’s a combination of all the bad bits of Twitter, Flickr and Blogger, to create a super-website which also ends with the letter ‘r’. It’s an un-policed, public social networking site with an emphasis on sharing photos. I see no potential for anything to go wrong there.

Putting my concerns about its low proportion of vowels aside for the moment, apparently Tumblr is absolutely hilarious and good for meeting people equally creative and hilarious as yourself. They must have prepared a brick wall for when I join. But seriously, and I say this as a fervid Twitterist, what do people get out of it? I think it’s a community for the sort of people who are interested in websites about “funny” pictures that take an age to download and don’t make me laugh (except Angry people in local newspapers, which is fantastic), and it allows people to create their own blog bursting with such goodness. It would be a bit rich of me to complain about interweb-blogging being made more accessible via my own blog, but what really worries me about Tumblr is that some people actually read the tosh on there (here on 404Blog this isn’t a problem for me).

And here’s another one!

The other day I read a post from someone upset over how much (probably genuine) abuse they’d received over Formspring. The problem with Formspring is that to be any good at it you have to be clever, and if you were clever you wouldn’t use it. I’m not blaming anyone here – even I, the incontestable lord of the internet, have thought to myself “I should do this, then when people abuse me I can slaughter them”.

Luckily I’ve always stopped myself. Unless you’ve just met George Lewis, you will never come out on top. Social networking has this great way of distorting everything so that when you post your witty riposte on Facebook, your friends will tell you how hilarious you are, therefore making you feel really big. Go you. You so funny. But remember that everyone who hasn’t commented thinks you’re a tit.

Whatever you do with Formspring will either make you cringe in a few years or make you want to kill yourself. Or both, with a cringe so massive you self-destruct. Having watched a couple of people fall apart over this electronic slanging-match, I can honestly say I’d rather tie a brick to my head and throw it off the Itchen Bridge.

I write all sorts of absolute tosh. Here’s some more of it.