When I joined firefly
(known to many as ffly) in November of 1995, the "matching" database
consisted only of musical artists and their works. There was one "buzz"
(or chat) room, which usually had no more than 5 or 6 people in it at a time.
It was a real treat then to find a total of 25 people online at ffly
simultaneously.
Along with the musical recommendation database and the buzz room,
ffly gave each member a message mailbox and a "home page." I've always
called my firefly home page my "firepage" since these pages can only be viewed
by people within the site. Three months after I had access to my firepage, I wrote my
first words there. HTML was a foreign language to me... and unlike today,
there were no helpful sites to be found anywhere. The first helpful list
of HTML tags I found were those posted by another ffly member, whom I didn't
know at all, nor did I ever meet. I do remember his name though!
Thanks Corwin for those first HTML
tags!. My bestest buddy, Mariah was the first
to tell me how to make a line break and how to use an image tag. Thanks Buddy!!
*smile*
Geeze... I'm getting way off track of the main message here! *smile* Pulling in the
nostalgic tangents for a moment, to mention that ffly offered several search options
to enable members to find other members who had the same musical interests. Matches
were made according to various ratings given to musicians by
ffly members. (They used to call members with very common preferences "neighbors."
Every time I used this search option, I never had any neighbors!! I wonder what that
says about me! *laugh*)
By the end of February 1996, ffly had gained popularity. Sometimes you would find
nearly 100 people there at the same time. With each passing month, the online
population seemed to double! It was not uncommon to find ffly "down,"
as they could not at first keep up with the overwhelming demand of its
members accessing the site. The hardware was overloaded and many times,
crashing the server site. We all hated it when ffly was down, but accepting of it.
I believe it was in April 1996, when the movie database was added to ffly. This
is when they switched to a second version of ffly (a version strange to us, but well-accepted
by all). By this time, the buzz rooms were quite numerous. In January, the conversation
in these rooms were almost strictly related to music. However, as time passed, the
topics of conversation became more diverse. There were lots and lots of people from all
over the world, talking about many different subjects now!!
In February 1997, it would not be uncommon to find 1200 members online. By this time, ffly
had upgraded their hardware enough to handle this population. Everything was wonderful at ffly,
in spite of a few minor technical difficulties from time to time.
Friendships among members developed very quickly. Many of these friendships will be lifelong
for me, and I know the same is true for many others. The community of ffly members were very
close-knit despite their growing numbers. New members were always treated respectfully. We LOVED
our little community and wanted to share it with others.
It seems to me that people with common musical interests (more so than those who have common
movie interests) share the same philosophies of life. I've had terrific discussions on a variety of
topics with some exceptional human beings; conversations ranging from deeply analytical to slightly silly *smile*.
The agent technology worked... and from recommendations made either by ffly or by other members,
I found many new musical artists that I deeply appreciate today; music that I might not have
discovered without ffly's agent technology.
