IMPORTED

Long before Facebook and Twitter ever existed, we were all fervent aborigines of a fabled global village called Friendster. There were no photo tags and no games (Farmville, anyone?) yet we were enraptured by the pygmy-like diversion and networking that we got from it. Not long after, our thirst for social networking became insatiable so we registered to other sites such as Tumblr, Multiply, Plurk and thanks to Marc Zuckerberg, our parents can now surveil our every move by simply logging on to their Facebook accounts.

As of today, there are over 500 million active users who each spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. But we should never really neglect our seedbed, the mother of them all (or at least here in the Philippines) - Friendster.

The other night, I saw in a newsflash that Friendster will be closed after a month. I wasn’t really agitated because I know that most of my friends in FS already migrated to Facebook just like yours truly. But I still logged into my FS account, just for the heck of it. And I found out that my last shoutout was January 3, 2010 and my last testimonial was December 30, 2009 which means that I haven’t really visited my Friendster for more than a year.

I breezed through my ancient, retrograded profile, my albums (only 8) and some of the testimonials and right below my testimonials was my blog. I admittedly forgot that I used to maintain a blog in Friendster. I am cognizant that I maintained a journal or a diary but not in electronic form. So I clicked on one of the posts and read it. I skimmed through the previous posts until I was able to finish reading every single one of them, yes dating back to 2007.

“WOW! I CAN’T BELIEVE I WROTE THIS!” and “CRAP! I CAN’T BELIEVE I WROTE THIS!”—the two reactions I had after reading all those posts.

There were really ones which looked like they were written by Ms. Smarty Pants but there were a lot of those which were downright deplorable! Reading all of those posts was very entertaining. I can’t help but laugh after reading some of them because the mode of writing was so amateur-ish, not that I’m a really upright writer/blogger now…It’s just that I’m better than before.

Here are just some of the things that I noticed after reading my “maiden” blog posts:

·         *princess sophie*- there is this some kind of TM or byline of mine “princess sophie” because all of my former blog posts were usually synched with my Multiply blog which had the address of princesssophie.multiply.com and simply because I am such a FEELER, wanting to be a princess (just let me be, at least in this little kingdom I call a blog)

·         Comments in our vernacular- some posts have comments from my friends and we were so canny that we exchanged banters in our own dialect, after all, it’s only Friendster

·         Grammatically erroneous- there are some (very few actually), posts which are grammatically erroneous because let’s face it, what do you expect from a 13-year old? (at that time)

·         Excessive number of emoticons- there was one point in my life when I was hooked to emoticons because I consider myself as an emoticon as well, with all those facial expressions I am capable of making

·         Excessive and inappropriate punctuations- where can you see a sentence or a word with more than 15 exclamation marks after it? Only my sentences! And I am not proud of that.

·         Language, in general- some sentences can be considered “jejemonic”, some are hyperbolic in a drama queen kind of way and some are just downright gay!

I am remorseful but I won’t modify any of the imported posts content-wise but I will certainly revamp the typography so that it would be more delectable to the eyes and less bothersome (because some had font colors of neon pink and neon green). I will go through every single one of them and see what I can do about the construction, aesthetically speaking ONLY.

So after reading the posts, I went through the aggravation of importing those posts here in Blogger and after several hours of having that scowl on face, I finally did it. For the nth time, technology saved the day! I just refashioned some of the colors and the configuration so that they would be fine-tuned with the Blogger format.

Now anyone of you is free to pester on the obscure, uncelebrated specifics of my juvenile past life by simply clicking on one of the posts of 2007 or 2008 right from this same site (but you can spare yourself by doing otherwise).

Imported blog posts make me smirk of what was then and what is now. Things have changed and they will keep changing over the years and my only desire is that they will change for the better.

Who knows, I might stumble upon this very blog post and be entertained a hundred times over.