Expanding My Interests Technologically

     This week I joined iVillage and Foodspotting, which are two interest-based communities that I wanted to explore. These two sites have been a little more challenging and not as interesting as my current en devour with Pinterest.
     Setting up my profile for iVillage was extremely easy. I just had to follow the steps, add a picture, and answers a few questions if I wanted to, and adjusting my privacy settings. The privacy settings are not as indepth as most sites. You have two options in three categories---either make you profile, pictures, and like available to everyone or no-one. It was as simple as that. Although this may seem nice, I have grown to not enjoy it because I believe most people choose to not share anything with anyone, which takes away from the "community" aspect of the site. I have had extreme difficulty in finding anyone who allows me to view their profile. However, I can still communicate with them via responses on articles. So in a way, users are still interacting.
    The entire site is like a million different magazines thrown into one. You can find articles on almost anything and there are a lot of add-ons such as contests and iVillage rewards that enable you to connect with other users and unlock different things throughout the site. iVillage also connects with the outside world through their rewards. iVillage rewards are earned by subscribers in various different ways, such as by posting your opinion on articles or participating in contests. These rewards unlock new content and site experiences that one would normally not encounter unless they are active throughout the site. I earned a point just for logging in for the first time! The fact that you have to be active to earn points pushes users to connect.
    Due to the topics that are available on iVillage, such as pregnancy or hair and make-up, a vast majority of the users are females. This would make sense, however, since it is an interest-based site!
    My experience with Foodspotting has been not so user-friendly. I found the site through google when I was looking for a site that related to food because I enjoy finding delicious recipes online. Creating a profile was difficult alone. During the process of creating your profile, you can add your favorite foods and meals so that it connects you with those types of recipes. However, if I wanted to add something that was already a "choice"---such as when you begin to type a friend's name into Facebook and it automatically pops up---it would allow me to save it at all! I had to pick something that was already there. For example, I wanted to put down Strawberry-Mango Moscato as my favorite drink and that was not a choice and it would not let me save it as a new one so now I do not have a favorite drink at all. After my difficulties of creating my favorite food's list, the difficulties continued when I went to add my favorite restaurants. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner restaurants, all of which were not ready-made choices. So now, I have no favorites in that category.      
     After this I went to find places and people to follow. How this site works is that you can find specific dishes that people ordered at restaurants and they post these pictures, places, and meals on their profiles. Then other people who like those same types of dishes can find and follow them and ideally go visit that place to eat that delicious meal! As you can see, this entire site is about connecting with the outside world. However, in my searches, most of the places were more highly populated areas like California and New York. I have yet to find any places or foods that are in Maine. Therefore, this site has been rather useless to me.
    Hopefully the more a I browse through the sites, the more I will figure out and learn to enjoy them and gain something useful from them!