MSN Messenger

Long before it became fashionable for opinion columnists and old people to frequently wonder if the current generation was going to hell in a handbasket due to their over-reliance on social media (seen in every major newspaper editorial section from roughly 2006 onwards), a group of savvy teenagers were already part of a social networking phenomenon – MSN Messenger. I was having a drink with a group of friends the other night and we were reminiscing about the hours spent online chatting idly to friends. In a fit of inspiration a couple of us logged in to our old accounts, only to find that the rich online community of our time had become a ghost town, populated only by sassy spam-bots and tumbleweed drifting by.

In George Lucas’ 1973 film American Graffiti (surely the most important movie Lucas would make that decade) he portrays the American youth-culture of the early 1960s: t-shirt wearing, rocknroll listening, hair-slicked adolescents with nothing better to do after school than hop in their hotted-up cars and cruise the streets of California looking for something – anything – to do. While lacking hot-rods and the upbeat, good-time rock of Buddy Holly or the Beach Boys, my generation experienced something similar. Coming home from school, we’d rush for our computers and log on to MSN Messenger, our online mass-communication network of choice. I’m guessing anyone born from 1985-1995 probably was a heavy user of MSN from around 2000-2007, the period in which most of that generation were teenagers and ‘Facebook’ was a word that described what school bullies did to over-enthusiastic nerds.

I was born in 1990 and a heavy user of the program from roughly 2002 – 2007, logging in most days for an hour or more. I don’t remember much about signing up but I do vaguely recall seeing my sister using the service and getting her to help me set up a Hotmail account so I could join in the fun. The various Hotmail addresses that we all dreamed up were quite special in their own right; mine was black_betty411@hotmail.com. I remember thinking I was desperately cool to have such an obscure, old rock song as my username until Spiderbait came out about a year later and flooded the charts with their good, but ultimately inferior, cover version.

As with most activities undertaken by teenagers, many adults couldn’t see the point. ‘You’ve spent all day seeing these people at school, what do you talk about?’ To be honest, I couldn’t answer then and I can’t answer now. All sorts of things that occupy fifteen year old minds, I suppose; school gossip, television, music, movies. The sheer amount of time spent online meant that most of the chat was bound to be filler – and a lot of time was spent on conversations that ultimately went nowhere (for maximum effect, read the following while constantly playing the MSN message alert sound, found here):

d33my says: hey

d33my’s friend says: hey

d33my says: whats going on?

d33my’s friend says: nm

*ten minute pause*

d33my’s friend says: u?

*d33my’s friend is offline.*

At least, that’s how I remember it. Maybe I was more unpopular than I thought. Of course, there were regular contacts (usually your best friend/s) that you had long, in-depth conversations with. As various Messenger updates were released, the ability to play games was added, along with the ability to send hand drawn picture messages, which satiated teenage boys’ ingrained desire to draw and distribute filthy sex-oriented images. Did girls do this too?

There was something particularly special about seeing the little status box pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen (accompanied by the equally satisfying sound effect) which told you your crush was online. After a while you’d develop a special sort of peripheral vision in which you could determine who had signed in just by the first couple of characters of their username, particularly if it involved various emoticons. Of course this was fraught with danger when your mates got wind of who your crush was and changed their username to something incredibly similar, leading you to look like a dick by starting a conversation with someone without checking their email address and finding yourself flirting with the same person who had given you a wedgie two hours ago.

In fact, there were many similar pranks/activities to spice up your MSN experience when simply chatting with people got boring. Remember being added to (or starting) huge group conversations with someone’s entire contact list? It became a sort of online Survivor to see who would outlast everyone and be left alone with Андрій from Ukraine who vaguely knew your friend’s brother’s girlfriend. Or how about sending Nudges to someone every ten seconds (or however often MSN allowed it – I can imagine a Beta version of Messenger without the nudge time limit which would have caused everyone to violently smash their computers to bits within seconds) and having them nudge you back? This would usually go on until either both people got sick of it (rarely) or one party blocked the other (often).

MSN was also beneficial in many ways you might not initially imagine. I know for a fact my typing speed was aided specifically from constant MSN usage – no-one’s going to wait for someone to take a full minute to type ‘how are you’ so you’d better learn fast or stick to handwriting letters. Of course many people learned bad typing habits (I do not touch type in a traditional manner; rather my hands hover over the keyboard like mutant hummingbirds and peck wildly at letters until the correct combination is reached) that can probably never be unlearned.

As far as I remember hardly anybody used the space for a profile picture with a picture of themselves. Instead, they were filled with funny pictures, album covers, skimpy bikini models or super-hunks. There was also the fun of coming up with a unique screen name, which could be changed quickly and often. Song lyrics, inspirational quotes or swear words were favourites amongst my contact list, and a lot could be discerned about someone without even starting a conversation with them but rather examining their username. Nearly anybody who had a flower or love-heart in their name was a girl, someone who used obscure song-lyrics was a wannabe musician and anyone who used an actual name like ‘Steve’ was probably a cop. I remember using Google to find an ‘MSN name generator’ which would come up with cool lyrics or quotes and have appropriate emoticons to match. I tried Googling the same thing as I was writing this and my anti-virus software identified the number one result as a security threat. Such is MSN’s fall from grace.

And what a fall it has been. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why MSN is no longer as popular, but the advent of sites like MySpace (which deserves another post entirely) and Facebook coupled with the prevalence of mobile phones (and cheap texting) had a lot to do with it. Of course, I’m basing my assumption of MSN being ‘not popular anymore’ amongst my own friends, and to a wider extent, generation. I’m not sure if younger or older people still use MSN regularly, and I’m sure there’s some obscure country in the world where it’s still used by the teenagers as the communication model of choice. In fact, as recently as 2009 Microsoft announced that the service still had a rather impressive 330 million active users. Similarly, I’m not arguing that MSN was the first or only or even biggest online instant chat service, but from my experience it was the one that most people I know used.

There’s every chance that the success of sites like Facebook and Twitter owe much more to MSN than we give credit for. It established in an entire generation a familiarity with online connection and the concept of an online network of friends. More than that, the countless hours spent on MSN established a strong desire to have such a connection, and paved the way for our current penchant for online social networking. If you’ve never done it, I imagine it’s actually quite novel to have an online text-only instant conversation with someone but thanks to MSN, for most people of my generation we’ve scarcely known different.

It’s strange to write a retrospective style piece of a phenomenon which was still wildly popular less than a decade ago. For one thing, it makes me feel cultured and wise, and I can imagine gathering the grandkids around the digital fire and having them entranced at my stories of MSN in much the same way I remember thinking how novel it would have been to send a telegraph to someone. Furthermore, it once again highlights the breakneck speed at which online culture develops. I was surprised to discover that I only signed up for Facebook at the start of 2009 (it feels like much, much longer) - if I take my estimation of using MSN for about five years, then I currently still have more years’ experience on MSN than I do on Facebook – something which seems utterly peculiar. Perhaps in another five or six years’ time when we've migrated over to the next big social networking phenomenon we’ll be reminiscing about the good old days of Facebook. But it's comforting to know that there's a group of young adults out there who, deep down, would all be pretty happy if we rejected social networking progress and made a large scale retro-migration back to MSN.

Beautifulpeople.com

"Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in." – Ricky Fitts, American Beauty (1999)

The person who created the website beautifulpeople.com may have felt the same way as Ricky Fitts. And what better way to appreciate the innate and omnipresent beauty of our world (plastic bags blowing in the wind notwithstanding) than by creating an exclusive online club in which only beautiful people are allowed? Depending on your point of view, the greatest virtue of the internet - anonymity - also has the potential to be its biggest downfall. The anonymous nature of the internet is great for criminals and nerds with strange fetishes but not so great for those people whose jawlines look like they’ve been chiselled by George Clooney’s teeth. How are these beautiful people meant to get the recognition from the internet that their looks deserve when, most of the time, others can interact with them yet not even see them? Welcome to beautifulpeople.com.

Beautifulpeople.com is essentially a dating site with a twist – before becoming a member, potential inductees supply a picture and brief profile of themselves and are voted on by current members on their level of beauty with the all-encompassing and exhaustive options ranging from ‘Absolutely not’ to ‘No’ to ‘Hmm, ok’ to ‘Beautiful’. As a brief aside, the purpose of ‘absolutely not’ seems to exist solely to destroy self-esteem – surely simply ‘no’ would suffice? Anyway, the point is that only those that are ‘aesthetically blessed’ get in – a selective and exclusive process that the creators say ‘removes the first hurdle of online dating’, i.e. separating the wheat from the chaff.

Once the chaff has been unceremoniously turned away to become cowfeed, the wheat is allowed to be kneaded lovingly into a loaf of bread/full online profile and connect with other beautiful people/baked goods. I didn’t have the inclination, courage or crystal clear skin to try to set up a profile but then the inner workings of the site are probably not that interesting (no I’m not bitter, jealous or UGLY, okay?). What is interesting, however, are the implications of such a site and its philosophy of 'beauty above all else'. Who has the right to define what ‘beautiful’ is? Is it moral to rate people on their beauty? Is this sort of rating system only tolerated because it’s online? What would happen if this occurred at a physical institution?

Firstly, the site acknowledges that it is not trying to define what beauty is – that’s for the members to decide. The site defends its position by arguing that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but then having thousands of people voting on someone’s attractiveness kind of defeats that notion, don’t you think? The ‘eye of the beholder’ concept means one person making a judgement on another person and basing their decision on their own thoughts and opinions, whereas beautifulpeople.com is not individuals rating individuals but rather a group rating an individual. History has demonstrated that when a group of people congregate en masse to vote on the merits of a single person, things can sometimes go wrong. 

However, despite all that, I don’t really have a moral problem with the site because of its ‘opt in’ nature. If you’re game enough to create a profile and throw yourself at the feet of the most beautiful/potentially shallow people the internet has to offer then go right ahead. Any subsequent increase or decrease in your self-esteem is your own fault. The site clearly and unashamedly states that entry is based on physical attractiveness. This honesty is perhaps a better way to deal with our society’s inevitable preference for good-looking people rather than the underhanded way that it often happens in real life. Consider, for example, a recent case in Hobart in which a woman was turned away from a nightclub, ostensibly because she didn’t meet the dress code but fairly obviously because she wasn’t considered attractive enough (by the way, I have been admitted to said nightclub in the past, therefore definitively PROVING MY ATTRACTIVENESS). 

The Hobart case is morally troubling because while going to the club is certainly an ‘opt in’ decision for the woman, being ranked on your physical appearance by the door crew at that club is not. But imagine the outcry if the club in question categorically came out and stated that it would only allow beautiful people in, ranked by the patrons already inside the club.  Beautifulpeople.com gets some leeway in this regard because it’s online, whereas in real life the ‘beauty’ policy is always hidden behind the smoke and mirrors of ‘dress codes’ or similar. 

The leeway beautifulpeople.com receives is due to a couple of factors – the first is the ‘opt in’ clause that I mentioned above, and the fact that it exists online certainly helps, but more importantly, there is no personal interaction on the part of the members voting on the attractiveness of the inductees. Rather, the process is done anonymously through a profile picture and a mouse-click, often from the other side of the world. For both the ranker and the rankee, this is infinitely easier and less morally troubling to do than to stand face to face with someone and make a decision on the level of their attractiveness.

Having first heard of the site I expected to be appalled and outraged by the shallow and exclusive nature of it, but the more I explored the issues surrounding it I came to the conclusion that the site and its central premise is, for the most part, benign. Nobody is being forced to do anything they don’t want to, honesty and democracy are encouraged and, finally, all of us who are not ‘aesthetically blessed’ finally have an online space where we can send all the attractive people to fawn over each other while we get on with our lives.

Google+

It's that time of year when a multi-billion dollar information technology company makes its annual foray into the mysterious world of social networking. Last year we watched Apple's musically-oriented Ping never quite get off the ground, and at various times over the years we've had MySpace try to reinvent itself and Microsoft promise that they've got a social networking revolution in the pipeline. Google has tried once before to enter the social networking arena with their ill-fated Buzz platform, but this time has vowed not to make the same mistakes and is attempting to really shake things up with Google+.

‘Thank God,’ I hear you say, ‘that somebody has finally realised that what the world needs is a huge integrated online network which allows me to share things with my friends.’ Although their idea isn’t exactly revolutionary, Google needs to break into the social networking scene because, as Facebook has demonstrated, there is a huge market for advertising when people voluntarily give up information such as where they live, where they like to travel and what they like to eat, watch, read and listen to. Advertising revenue is the oil which greases the Google cogs, and if they could tap in to even half of Facebook’s vast membership then it's mission accomplished and caviar baths for all.

First things first: the name. I can't decide if I love it or hate it. I think the main problem I have with 'Google+' is its dullness coupled with its ambiguity. Facebook is a great name because it escapes ambiguity by being essentially what it promotes itself to be: an extension of a physical college facebook (never mind the fact that most of the world outside North America probably had no idea what a 'facebook' was pre-2005; FB’s popularity in the US was so well established that it didn't matter anymore).  MySpace is another example of a solid name which pretty quickly tells you what you have in store. Twitter also escapes name criticism because although the name is ambiguous it is interesting enough to contemplate. 

Conversely, 'Google+' looks like the name of 1970s Soviet software that was specifically programmed to sort and rank south-Ukranian wheat stocks. The name doesn't really offer you anything exciting. ‘Google’ may well have been an intriguing word that garnered interest in 1998 but the company has been so successful that it is blasé now.  The 'Plus' tells you precisely nothing about what the product is or does, except for a vague notion that it may enhance your life (or your wheat inventory). The thing it has going for it is the fact that it clearly tells you that it’s a Google initiative, and Google is a good, strong brand. And, granted, it is marginally better than ‘Buzz’, which perhaps started the 2010 trend of giving social networking start-ups moronic monosyllabic monikers.

Let's skip past the rigours of getting an invite* (which is becoming easier by the day) and take a look around. Looks eerily familiar, doesn’t it? The page layout is, rather unimaginatively, essentially a Facebook clone:

Click for larger image

Can you blame them? Why not try and emulate a service that has a quarter of a billion regular users? Using a Facebook style layout means that people are already familiar with the system and can dive right into using Plus. For example, the ‘Like’ button has become the ‘+1’ button, so whenever you see something that appeals to you, you can hit the +1 and declare your approval publicly. 

But why design a social network clone of Facebook if you want people to move from FB onto your service? It gives people no incentive to make the switch, because all you get is Facebook with Google’s logo plastered all over it. The argument that you have to stick with something that people are familiar to doesn’t necessarily hold up either, as when FB started getting big it looked markedly different from MySpace profiles, which was its biggest competitor at the time. Budgetary issues surely wouldn’t have been a big concern for Google; perhaps they could have paid their programmers to come up with something a bit more revolutionary. However, Plus can’t be faulted in terms of usability, every action is fairly intuitive and there are quite a few keyboard shortcuts which can be mastered to save time.

 

One of the first things I noticed about Plus when filling out your profile information was that Google lets you update the privacy settings for each piece of information that you edit. This makes it really easy to quickly set up a level of profile privacy that you’re happy with, without having to venture to a ‘Privacy’ tab and try and work out which setting will affect which piece of info. This is not to say that Google’s privacy ‘settings’ are actually any better or more secure than Facebook (which are quite comprehensive, once you find them) but they are much more user friendly.

  

Circles

Plus’s big selling point is its ‘Circles’ feature, in which you can separate your friends into groups which reflect real life networks. No longer do you have to fear your boss or your mother getting hold of that photo of you riding a tricycle through the zoo in the nude after a night on the turps, because with Circles you can be choosy about who you share certain things with. Furthermore, it provides you with an opportunity to ‘Follow’ certain people without them needing to add you to a Circle, which makes Plus a hybrid between Twitter and Facebook. Circles brings us closer to needing only one networking account that you can use for both business and social contacts. 

The concept is not quite as revolutionary as Google would like to have you believe, for similar features exist on Twitter and Facebook (‘Lists’) and the smaller social networking experiment Diaspora, whose ‘Aspects’ feature seems to work in the same way as Circles does.  Although Plus isn’t the first social network to provide a contact sorting feature, Circles appears to be the best attempt at it so far. I tried to organise my Twitter followers into lists the other day and died of boredom after adding four contacts. On Twitter it takes at least three clicks just to add someone to a list. Plus lets you add somebody to a Circle in one.

Hangouts

One feature I haven’t had much time to test is the Hangout feature, which lets you connect via webcam with a group of up to 10 people. I’m unsure if this will be a big drawing card to the service. One of the advantages of social networking meant that you could interact with your friends without having to get out of your pyjamas or shave or wear pants. As soon as you bring a webcam into the mix, normal social rules apply. While I’m sure some people will make the most of Hangouts (travelling family members, business meetings) I can’t imagine it becoming used as regularly as simple online chat. Now watch as I’m proven wrong and a social networking revolution occurs in which everybody starts interacting via vidphone as promised in every sci-fi book and film created from 1948 to 1994.

  

Sparks

The other feature worth noting on Plus is the ‘Sparks’ feed, which lets you subscribe to a news feed (provided by Google search) of things you’re interested in. For example, I made a Sparks page on the Space Shuttle, and so whenever I visit that page I get up to date news, pictures and videos about the final Space Shuttle flight. It’s kind of handy, but anything more obscure than ‘Space Shuttle’ or ‘White House’ tends to return a pretty eclectic collection of ‘news’. I tried Sparks with the Melbourne Football Club and got a variety of out of date news and a bunch of articles that mention the MFC in passing. No doubt Sparks is something that will improve once the field trials are completed but if Google really wanted to impress people it should have made this feature a bit more intuitive.

So, aside from worldwide social domination and filling their coffers to the brim, what are Google trying to achieve with Plus? Here’s what they claim:

‘The Google+ Project makes sharing on the web more like sharing in the real world.’

Google have taken an interesting focus with Plus. Whereas Facebook has historically been based on connecting with people, Google have identified sharing information as being the most critical feature of social networking. Plus is geared towards the dissemination of information: the status box asks you to ‘Share what’s new’, as opposed to FB’s ‘What’s on your mind?’ The focus on sharing equates to Google trying to design a product which incorporates the features of other sites like Twitter and Digg with social sites like Facebook and MySpace. Google’s ultimate aim is for Plus to become your networking hub, whether it is professional or social. As in the real world, you’re probably not going to ‘share’ photos of your weekend away with your boss, just like you wouldn’t share last month’s data entry reports with your loved ones. The Circles feature means that this is now possible, and in this regard Google certainly have made it easier to share information between different parties as it would occur in the ‘real world.’ 

Whether or not people will find the service useful enough to abandon Facebook and Twitter is another matter, and the only way I can see Plus being truly successful is if they become the only social networking site that people use. Facebook and Twitter are different enough that people will quite happily use both, but I find it hard to imagine someone using Facebook, Twitter and Plus regularly. One of them would have to give, and history suggests it will be the new kid on the block.

The problem with Plus is that it is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. There is nothing different or useful enough on Plus to entice people away from their established presence on Facebook and Twitter. Google’s attempt to create a networking hybrid seems to have come up with an acceptable half-breed that lets you do some nifty – but ultimately pointless – things.

Of course, if we’re honest, that's essentially the whole concept behind social networking anyway.

*Thanks to Kim, who sent me my Plus invite.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda: An open letter to the second place getters of the Digital Age

Do you ever stop and wonder about those websites that seem perpetually on the cusp of greatness, but haven’t quite cracked the big time, and instead constantly play second fiddle to the big corporations? As in Chinese philosophy, to every Yin there must be a Yang, and for every Simon, there is a Garfunkel.* For every wildly successful multi-billion dollar internet start up that contributes new verbs to the common vernacular [‘Did you friend her? Nah, I googled her and she’s wanted for armed robbery in three states’ etc] there is another site which offers remarkably similar services yet hasn’t quite reached the critical mass of users to become the popular standard.

Google > Yahoo!

Did you know that Yahoo! is the second largest search engine on the web? Seems like a pretty good deal for them, huh? The problem is, the first place holder, Google, holds 85 per cent of the search query market. Yahoo! comes in at second place with 6 per cent. That’s the equivalent of Usain Bolt winning the 100m as his competitors cross the 20m mark. Hardly a satisfying second place, is it?

Beyond the search engine itself, Yahoo! offers similar services to Google, in terms of webmail, videos, maps, and advertising. So why is there such a large discrepancy between the two? Google made a name for itself due to its search algorithm being notoriously accurate, at least more accurate than its competitors. Whether or not Yahoo!’s search system is now on par with Google is irrelevant: during the critical period of people flocking to the internet (new millennium onwards) Google proved time and again the best search tool. Searching with Google is so seamless (especially if you’re using Chrome) that I hardly think of myself as ‘using Google’ anymore. I just think of something I need to know, type it in, and it appears before me. Google has effectively become an invisible hand in the information gathering process, and this is surely the goal of any serious search engine company.

Similar examples of complete market saturation exist outside the internet. Band-aids, Bubble-Wrap, Eskys, Stanley Knives, are all examples of ‘Generiscized Trademarks’, in which the product name has actually transcended its own company or service and become the standardised term for any similar product. Google is approaching this now, with most people using ‘Google’ as a term which incorporates virtually any sort of internet search. Of course, with an 85 per cent market share, chances are most people actually are ‘Googling’ everything.

YouTube > Dailymotion

Daily-whawha? At least, that was my reaction when I discovered French video hosting site Dailymotion was the second largest video sharing website in the world. Much like the Google/Yahoo comparison, Dailymotion is a fair way behind YouTube, with 60,000,000 video views per day compared to YouTubes astronomical 1,200,000,000. Of course, YouTube’s success is helped by the fact that it is owned by Google, so that many video searches undertaken by Google will inevitably direct you to YouTube.

However, YouTube was a successful site in its own right before the takeover, and Google have been smart enough not to try and merge YouTube with Google Video, but instead keep the recognisable branding that YouTube built. What’s even more interesting is that before the takeover, Google Video never really came close to the sort of traffic YouTube was generating, despite the fact that Google was the largest search engine at the time.

YouTube, like Google, found success with its easily useable interface. Videos were easy to find and upload, utilisation of attractive site design and memorable branding (the red loading bar is particularly iconic) and clever innovations has meant that YouTube has secured a place as the third most popular site in the world, behind Google and Facebook.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the Dailymotion website, and it was founded only one month after YouTube in 2005. However, like Google, YouTube has become the pop culture standard for a generation of users. Additionally (and I have no idea how much influence this has) it takes approximately 0.45 seconds less time to type youtube.com than it does to type dailymotion.com. Add in the fact that Chrome users can now press ‘Tab’ and search YouTube content instantly, and it becomes hard to see how Dailymotion (or anyone else) will come close to knocking YouTube off its perch as the No. 1 video site.

Facebook > Myspace

I feel particularly privileged that I can actually remember the day I signed up to Facebook. I’m trying really hard to hold onto that memory because it’s probably something that one day I’ll be able to tell a room full of really young people and they’ll laugh at me. I have a feeling that in the future no-one will ‘remember’ when they signed up to Facebook but instead it will just happen, like being able to tie your shoelaces or riding a bike or completing puberty. Kids will probably be signed up for an account when they’re born and then that’ll be the end of it.

One of my most distinct memories of joining Facebook was the fact that it was a social networking site that wasn’t MySpace. I mentioned above how hard difficult it appears for Yahoo to overtake Google or for Dailymotion to overtake YouTube, but don’t take for granted that it can’t happen. Facebook proved that you can take on the biggest rival in your industry and win convincingly.

How did they do it? Whole books could and will be written on why Facebook has succeeded. Briefly, Facebook started in American colleges, and in terms of pop culture, everybody on the planet wants to be doing what American university students are doing. If they’re on Facebook, then everybody will want to be on Facebook. It didn’t take long before other universities and high-schools were DEMANDING that Zuckerberg cut them into his network. When you have a controlled release like Facebook did, it creates hype, and people want what they don’t have. It was marketing genius.

But it wasn’t all to do with marketing. Facebook is actually a remarkable product. It would pretty much sell itself. It has been theorised that Facebook taps into basic human instincts and social practices, and this partly accounts for its widespread success. Zuckerberg has a knack for programming highly addictive software. The timing of FB’s release was ideal too. People had slowly learned the social network game on MySpace, but Facebook gave them something to really sink their teeth into. Innovations such as simple photo uploading and tagging, the newsfeed (which people hated at first), poking, liking and the prominence of the status update revolutionised the social networking world.

Will anybody be able to pull off the social networking coup de grace? People talk quietly of ‘the Facebook killer’, the service that is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace. Google are launching a new service, Google+, which they hope will replace Facebook as the social networking standard. It’s hard to see how they will achieve it. People already have much more invested in their Facebook profile than they ever did in MySpace, and Facebook is much bigger than MySpace ever was. Google+ will  have to be something incredibly remarkable in order to overthrow Facebook, but if anybody was going to pull it off, then you’d think the largest internet company in the world with millions of dollars behind it probably has the best chance.

Wikipedia > Scholarpedia

Sick and tired of people telling you that Wikipedia isn’t a viable source? Why not try out Scholarpedia, the free encyclopedia that not quite anybody can edit. As opposed to Wikipedia’s delightful free-for-all, Scholarpedia’s articles are written by scholars from around the world, and are peer-reviewed. If everybody’s quest for knowledge is so great that a site like Wikipedia can become the seventh most popular website in the world, why isn’t Scholarpedia visited just as much, as it provides reputedly better knowledge? (FYI, Scholarpedia is ranked at about the 300,000^th most visited site in the world).

Of course, most web users don’t necessarily want totally correct information; they just want a lot of it. Wikipedia’s lack of exclusiveness means that an incredibly wide range of topics are covered, including things that generally scholars wouldn’t write about. The longest article on the English Wikipedia is a list describing ‘Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2^nd Edition Monsters’. I’d like to see someone with a degree in that. Of course, this is really the stuff that people want to know about, as opposed to say, politics in Iran.

Furthermore, I have argued before that it is debateable how ‘unreliable’ Wikipedia really is. Many Wikipedia pages are guarded so carefully by those with a vested interest in them that vandalism becomes incredibly difficult. It seems that people have embraced Wikipedia, and are willing to defend its stance as the sum of most of humankind’s knowledge. It would appear that popular opinion is worth more on the internet than a doctorate. Whether or not this is a positive development is debateable, but most people are smart enough to recognise Wikipedia as an open source site, and treat its information accordingly.

So there you have it; a not particularly comprehensive guide to the world’s biggest websites and their poorer, uglier stepsisters. It must be kept in mind that the secondary websites are still, for the most part, multi-million dollar corporations, with the sort of web traffic that many can only dream about. I’m sure the founders of MySpace, Yahoo!, Dailymotion and Scholarpedia probably sleep quite happily at night. But it’s interesting that there only ever seems to be room for one at the top. And being at the top in the digital age is about more than raking in huge profits. It’s about having your company, your brand and your image representing your industry. Your company doesn’t just provide a service anymore; it provides a representation of the zeitgeist, which is something that immortalises corporations. Google is internet search, just as Facebook is social networking, and YouTube is online video. That sort of success and brand recognition can’t be bought by advertising no matter how hard you try: it can only be endorsed by the masses.

*Please don’t take this statement to mean that I have any sort of grasp of Chinese philosophy. P.S. sorry Art.

the Goody Bag™ Vol. I

Sometimes I have musings which aren’t complete enough to justify a full post, but are interesting enough to stay swimming around in my brain. So prepare to open some new tabs and waste some bandwidth as I bring you the first instalment of the Goody Bag™.

What’s in a name?

‘The Digital Printing Press’ is a nod to the power of the internet as a social institution, much like Gutenberg’s venerable machine before it. Just like the printing press, the internet has heralded a new age of information dissemination, and will be regarded as a high point in human history and innovation for centuries to come.

Looking to end it all?

Of course, this being a blog on all things virtual, I’m talking about online suicide. That’s right; a Dutch based web-service will now delete any existence of you ever being on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace et. Al. This is a scary thought. How much time has been devoted on our social accounts over the years? For some this would be akin to removing a part of their very being.

To me it’s interesting because I think some people are genuinely scared of how much time they spend online. They fear that they are losing connection with the ‘real’ world, becoming consumed with keeping up online appearances. But despite their fear, they cannot break away from it. It still consumes them. The Dutch company has identified this market and realised that the easiest way to break the hypnotic gaze of social networking is to push it off a cliff. I dislike the title suicide machine and I dislike the imagery associated with it. It’s certainly a dark topic, but despite the macabre connotations of the name and the site imagery (their icon is a noose), the creators promote the site as a healthy, life giving service. 

Email Etiquette

One of the stupidest things that I have seen on the internet is unsubscribing from an email newsletter only to have the company/promoter send you a ‘confirmation of successful un-subscription’ email. Surely this last email is actually loaded with spyware and because you have now opted out of the Terms and Conditions of their mailing list the company/promoter can now legally use this final email to download spyware onto your computer and swipe your perosnal information. Sorry about that last typo, I was re-adjusting my tinfoil hat.

In a similar vein, is it bad email policy to write one word responses like ‘Yes; Thanks; Okay; Excellent’ etc? With trillions of emails floating around on the net, it seems incredibly stupid to continue to clog it up with even more inane garbage. But failure to acknowledge someone’s email might mean they think you haven’t got it, so then they send it again, and then you’ll be obliged to send your acknowledgment email anyway and the actual email tally is now +1 on what it should have been. This is the kind of stuff that keeps me awake at night.

Book depository tracker

In case you don’t waste enough time on the Internet already, here’s a great site that tracks what books are being sold online around the world. The web app gives a nice visual representation of online bookseller The Book Depository’s global market: purchases in Europe, North America and Oceana are common but rarely is a purchase made in South America, Africa or Northern Asia. A highlight for me included someone in the UK somewhat poignantly buying 1984. Despite its Big Brother undertones, the website is helpful because if nothing else it helps to show that your life is infinitely more exciting than the poor sod from Malta who forked out 40 bucks for ‘Wind Energy Explained’.

That’s all for now. If you enjoyed this post, why not gently spam your friends by reposting on Facebook?  

Lord of the Ping(s)

Apple has thrown their hat into the social networking ring with the release of Ping, a networking service firmly based in music. When I first heard about it, I was intrigued, wondering how the service would work and if it was going to knock other sites like MySpace and Facebook off their well deserved lofty perches. I also wondered why Apple had chosen such a hideous sounding name for their product, but imagined that ‘Ping’ scraped in just ahead of ‘iPing’ and ‘MySpacev2.0’ (what makes me really amused is that some high powered marketing twat got payed ~$20,000 to come up with monosyllabic drivel. ‘Ting! Zing! Bing! Xing!’ There you go Apple; I just named your next four products. That’ll be 80k thanks) However, after exploring Ping, I don’t think Apple is seriously threatening the industry leaders of social networking – yet. 

My primary issue with Ping is that it feels like a big marketing tool. From a PC you can only access Ping through iTunes 10 and so Apple have integrated Ping with their online music store. Consequently it seems that almost all the status updates from the ‘big bands’ (e.g. I’m following Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga, Muse, Nirvana) are simply tools to sell more records. Bob Dylan, for example - and I get the feeling if you asked him Bob would never have heard of Ping - has included all his own songs in the ‘Music I like’ pane (a spot usually reserved for artists to show which other musicians they admire), positively screaming ‘this page was made by a record company exec!’.

Subtle, Bob

 I will keep a close eye on this, but I also have a theory that a lot of artists will have links to other acts on the same record label as them, regardless if they actually ‘like’ the music. Obviously as musicians record sales are one of their primary concerns, but after people have gotten used to the intimacy of Twitter a status update on Ping that’s obviously from a PR intern is not exciting. Twitter is exciting because for a lot of personalities, their tweets have less to do with selling records and more to do with the artist’s everyday life, giving a personal connection to followers that our invasive cyber society craves. In this way Ping is more like an extension of the ‘Store’ page on a bands website rather than a social tool. 

Ping is only a few days old, and at this stage it seems rather heavily populated by the international acts that I mentioned before. Ping has the potential to become significantly better when it is utilised by smaller, local acts, in much the same way that MySpace is used now. Again, there are several barriers that I can see which would prevent smaller acts choosing Ping over MySpace. The primary one is that more people have access to the internet than they do to iTunes Ping. Not everybody uses iTunes, and even less of those people who do use it would actively use Ping. Of course the logical conclusion is for bands to set up both MySpace and Ping profiles, but I bet I know which one most bands will create first. Since Facebook took over the mantle from MySpace as the primary social networking site, MySpace has focused on the music side of social networking, and it does this admirably. It is too early to judge whether Ping will seriously challenge this, but it would have to do a few things differently before it can be considered a serious contender.

Nirvana and The Boss

 What needs to change? For a start, I’d love to see Ping move off the iTunes pane and into an actual website accessible from a normal browser. I’ve never been particularly enamoured with the iTunes store interface, and to have a whole social networking site within this theme gets very annoying. The fact that you have to download and install iTunes 10 to get access to Ping is a turn off as well, I could have started ten Twitter accounts by the time I was ready to launch Ping. Couple with the way Apple mysteriously ‘gathers information’ before starting Ping, I had the eerie feeling I wasn’t social networking but being interrogated by the virtual Gestapo. 

The actual artist pages are very bland, and it seems in the first release there is very little room for this to change. To give an example, Lady Gaga’s page looks very similar to Bruce Springsteen’s: all pages have the same drab, greyish background. I can’t understand in the era of Web 2.0 why Apple would be limiting online creativity to some sort of Orwellian conformance. Of course, one man’s drabness is another’s functionality, so what I see as boring others will see as refreshingly simple. 

Ping's "Simple" User Interface

 Ping will also increase significantly in ‘funness’ when more ordinary people join up. As far as I can tell, none of my friends are using Ping (no sniggering over my lack of friends, please. They’re just not as sophisticated as me, that’s all). Apple were planning to have some sort of built in connectivity with Facebook to facilitate bringing over large quantities of people to the new site, but Facebook pulled out at the last minute. Now I am left with sending the standard ‘You should join me on Ping’ emails provided by the site, but I don’t hold much hope for these (when was the last thing you did something that someone suggested you do via a generic email?). Ping also lacks fun-ness simply because there isn’t much to do. Sure you can look at band pictures, or get a status update from them, but there is nothing that Ping adds to social networking that wasn’t provided before by either MySpace or Twitter, apart from the ability to purchase songs directly from your Ping feed.

Therefore, at this stage, I’m inclined to think of Ping not as a social networking revolution but as the next stage in online shopping evolution. Artists can post songs via their Ping page and followers can buy those songs from Apple in one click. Ping can be seen as extension of the iTunes store, giving artists a chance to talk back to their fans and be their own salespeople instead of relying on Apple to flog their wares for them. 

Unfortunately, Ping lacks the intimacy of Twitter, the functionality and popularity of Facebook and the industry standard-ness of MySpace. In two months I will endeavour to write again about Ping, because it is slightly unfair to judge a social networking site a third of a month after it was launched. In two months time I could be saying what a fool I am, that Ping has changed the way we interact forever, but at this stage unless some massive improvements are made I think Ping will remain a fledgling product.

Check out
www.apple.com/itunes/ping

Twitter: Or, How to stop worrying and love the 140 character message

Twitter provides a simple, direct and quick way to connect with people. It has enormous potential as a marketing tool or something that can quickly spread ideas and important messages. Here are some cool and intriguing things that would not have happened without Twitter, the little website that is changing social interaction one tweet at a time:

• Professional cyclist Lance Armstrong impulsively organised a group ride in Ireland via his Twitter account.

• @abolish cancer announced that for every person who followed their account, a supporter of theirs would donate one US dollar. Over $7,500 was raised.

• Recently, South Korea tried to bar users from reading tweets from an account opened by a branch of the North Korean government, who were using Twitter to spread anti-South and anti-US propaganda.

• A Chinese school used Twitter to help students learn by asking them to tweet and respond to fellow students tweets in English

• Mike Massimino, an astronaut, sent the first tweet from space in 2009 during a mission to the Hubble space telescope.

• In the US, the library of Congress has pledged to document every single tweet made since Twitter’s inception in 2006.

• In Australia, the Australian Football League official Twitter has involved the fans in the game by publishing crowd tweets LIVE on the scoreboard at the game. This turns every spectator into a potential commentator. Look> http://twitpic.com/2jujhx

Twitters effectiveness in connecting people will only grow as more people sign up, with currently 100 million users on Twitter. In the future, Twitter could be used even more prominently in events like elections, national disasters, and other global issues which require the quick dissemination of important information. Twitter is more than just inane status updates, it’s changing the way we interact.

Check out: 

www.twitter.com

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_usage