Eons reviews

Eons is a very wonderful site to express yourself
and meet great friends...A real learning experience ~ photogardener

In response to the first reviewer of this one, I admit it. I have no idea how the world works.

But I did spend some time looking around here anyway, and sorry, but although I'm a "boomer" I'm not going to be coming back. Even though it's created by the man who created monster.com, and might have been a great idea, it's been around a few years and still doesn't seem to have gone anywhere much. I looked for a "Watchers of Drying Paint" group and was surprised not to find one. As for groups that might suit me, I searched for "eccentrics" and "misfits" and they didn't have either. There's a group for perpetual hippies but they're largely too stoned to contribute, I guess.

The very top group of the lot, far and away most popular for a year, is full of quizzes such as "how many words can you think of that begin with B and end in D", and even though there was a photograph of a bed added as a clue, the word I was thinking of was "bored".

The site has all the hallmarks of the seminal online community model - lots of groups with one or two - and in one case zero - members (presumably even the person starting the group was too apathetic to join it), groups with one or two postings a week, or none for a year, and the inevitable "where did everyone go?" messages.

On the plus side, it features the useful self-help groups also seen most commonly in those earlier community models - survivors of depression and abuse and cancer, and groups for writers with writers' block and artists with whatever the equivalent is, and so forth. And there are the usual recycled joke, political and religious groups that you'd expect to be there, though I must be honest and admit I didn't search to see if there was a Sarah Palin fan club. It might have been super-popular, and I really didn't want to find out.

Not everything is dull, there are some unique ideas for groups, but none of those seem to have got very far off the ground. None that I found, anyway. And that suggests a certain lack of support for individualism, which probably comes with getting too old and too conservative to want to stand out from the crowd. Celebrity, once celebrated, becomes regarded as attention-seeking, deprecated even though we still vote for some of the greatest attention-seekers we can find.

OK, so I'm an eccentric and misfit enough to go looking for a group for misfits, even as I recognize that's an oxymoron. There's nothing essentially wrong with the model, and for those who enjoy being here, there's no reason to change. But looking back over the years, it reminds me very much of early online communities around the mid-1990s, and that model has long been superseded by Facebook and other web 2.0 social networks. Are the current concepts any better? Not necessarily, but that's where the future of the social web lies, leaving a site like this feeling somewhat of a backwater.

On the BIG plus side, visitors can look around the groups and even read all the messages without having to sign up. And I didn't see any of those irritating Facebook "like" buttons either, which is becoming a very rare event indeed.

If you're old enough to know better, don't pay me too much mind. Take a look for yourself. It's a more stable and more gently paced sort of community than those which prevail in younger age groups, and I do feel a certain sense of nostalgia for these. The problem is, they didn't survive the rapid progress in web society and I doubt this one will, either.