Monthly Archive for July, 2006

The Bebo Killer? The Future Of Social Networking

Published
by
Adam
on July 13, 2006
in Bebo, Current Affairs, Geekiness and Thinking
. 13 Comments

Yesterday I wrote about how Bebo had unleashed its greatest feature yet, Bebo Bands, which is enabling the infamous social networking phenomenon tackle the MySpace giant head on. But as it stands Bebo is currently on the verge of looking cluttered because its interface wasn’t designed to accomodate a full scale social networking site and instead was set up purely as a contact sharing site. This means that there are only so many features that Bebo can add to keep its userbase immersed and eventually users will bore of Bebo in search of the latest social networking site to arrive in town. What will this killer site be though? Well over the past while I’ve been tracking the progress of several up and coming sites which show a lot of promise as well as keeping an eye on the older social networking sites who are looking to reinvent themselves!

Now as you can imagine, it’s difficult to predict what the masses will want 6 months down the line but I reckon there will be an attempt to move away from the current trend of semi-static profiles whereby users enter in information manually and select a video manually. In essence, the future of social networking relies on a degree of automation. Picture this, you download an app which interacts with Winamp alá LastFM which then fetches your most played songs and fills in your favourite bands section and recommends other bands to listen to as well as suggesting other members profiles based on musical taste. I know that LastFM does this and does it very well, but a truly successful social-networking site would have to be much broader than this and not rely on nichés therefore appealing to the largest possible audience. Of course finding users with a similar taste in music to you would grow tiresome after a while and would also result in many false-positive matches being made. You need more diverse fields that can be compared with other users.

This is where I come onto the popular StumbleUpon plugin. Stumble Upon is a very, very promising plugin which is steadily growing in terms of popularity. Like LastFM, StumbleUpon also matches users based on tastes all integrated into a social networking frontend. In this case, the plugin comes in the form of a simple toolbar with several key buttons; “Stumble”, “Like” and “Dislike”. When setting up the plugin, you select what type of websites you like, ’sport’ and ‘movies’ for example. Whenever you click on ‘Stumble’ you will be directed to a site, based on your preferred categories, that someone else liked. After a while of ’stumbling’, the site builds up a profile of sites that you like and dislike and as stated earlier, matches you with other likeminded surfers. If something like this is implemented it opens almost endless possibilities with the ability to check out what sites your friends like being the first idea to spring to mind! Logging data of what sites people like and dislike would also be very useful for potential advertisers.

Advertising is one of the major obstacles that needs to be overcome when operating a social networking site. Advertisers are known to be hesitant to be associated with social networking sites where questionable content often arises which may harm a companies reputation. This means that it’s difficult to monetize these sites. If a feature akin to that provided by StumbleUpon was introduced to a social networking site, webmasters would no longer have to bombard users with ads and instead could simply deliver one ad which is chosen based on that particular members surfing history i.e if I like Sports sites then it could show me one ad relating to a sport which I’m known to like. This would be much more effective than the current systems in place on sites like Bebo which display ads based on popular keywords on the particular page you are viewing. This means that if I view someones profile on Bebo, I’m being delivered ads based on their profile whereas really I should be delivered ads based on my profile! It would result in a much higher CTR (Click Through Rate) and less intrusive ads for the members who are responsible for generating revenue for the website!

New social networking sites spring up almost everyday, some with new and totally out of this world ideas (eg: Zebo) while others just aim at improving on an already tried and tested formula (eg: hi5.com). I feel that the next successful social networking site will be one which strikes a balance between the two. People don’t want to see more MySpace clones but at the same time they don’t quite fancy the idea of having to familiarise themselves with something completely different to what they are used to and given the fierce competition in this sector of the internet, if a site fails to strike that all important balance, then it will almost certainly die off and be forgotten about.

Lets not forget about security though. The issue of security has been well highlighted throughout all forms of media and Bebo and MySpace are often the subject of sensational newspaper headlines or the topic of chat shows. The Bebo phenomenon even warranted an investigation by Primetime! Thanks to this media coverage, most sites have tightened up their security and now employ a dedicated team of moderators to monitor flagged content. Unfortunately, the internet is synonomous with anonymity which means that administrators will always be fighting an uphill battle especially when the intelligence of some members is questionable. Bebo has done an excellent job in making it’s members aware of the dangers of accepting people you do not know and any other large social networking site should aim to follow Bebo as an example. If a site should suceed in surpassing the standards set by Bebo then it will be well on it’s way to large scale domination!

The type of site that I have suggested above would be massive. It would undoubtedly be a massive drain on server resources having to maintain a massive database of popular music and websites - in realtime! One option would be to attempt to integrate the existing services into one site like Bebo has been doing with its Bebo TV option which is integrated with VideoEgg. It may be the quick solution and for now it seems to be working, but it’s main disadvantage is that it’s a closed format with little room for in-house development in the future which would hurt the site in the long-run!

So are there any existing sites which fit the bill? Well one site of particular interest is Orkut.com which is a Google-backed social networking site. It’s current policy is one that promotes organic growth. This means that you can’t sign up yourself, instead you must be invited by someone that is already a member. Given the infamous resources of Google, if they were to prioritize the development of the site, the sky would be the limit to what they could achieve! Until they open it to the general public though, Bebo and Myspace have nothing to worry about!

Lets not forget about Microsofts offering, MSN Spaces which is integrated into MSN Messenger and looks set to be integrated into the delectable looking Live.com. Given it’s current popularity with bloggers, MSN Spaces is not to be ruled out especially with the imminent official launch of Live.com - a Web2.0 portal.

TagWorld is a site that I actually feel sorry for. It’s features far surpass those offered by MySpace.com and lots of money has been spent on advertising its superior customization potential yet it fails to win over the audience of its competitors. I don’t think a reinvention is on the cards with its current owner owing to the fact that everything they’ve tried thusfar has been fruitless!

There are two new players to the social networking scene though and I’m happy to say that they do have the potential to be the future of social networking. GoingOn and PeopleAggregator both started out as one, however in December of 2005, the two creators split having come to two different conclusions as to how the site should operate. The basic ideas of the two sites are very similar. The sites in themselves are social networks where you can write blog posts, create groups, upload media and add friends, but they allow you to create your own social network within the site which offers users the chance to create their own Bebo like site. From what I can gather, the same username and password can be used throughout all of the created social networks. Cross-site compatibility is something which has astronomical potential. GoingOn.com is not open source, but is far more slicker than “PeepAgg”. Whether or not these two sites will indeed surpass Bebo.com and MySpace.com in the future is a tough one to call. PeepAgg and GoingOn have an interesting business model and plenty of new features as well as improving on existing social networking features which could just be what the people need.

Bebo release THE MySpace Killer!

Published
by
Adam
on July 11, 2006
in Bebo, Geekiness, Music and News
. 21 Comments

Bebo Bands
Since Bebo hit the headlines at the beginning of the year, many people wondered did it have what it took to be a giant-killer and overcome the major opposition in the form of the Rupert Murdoch controlled MySpace.

Over the past few months, very little in the way of groundbreaking features were introduced over at MySpace, however they did have the support of bands which, I feel, are vital to the survival of any of the social networking sites that we’ve seen come and go over the past year or so. MySpace seemed to be concentrating on tightening up their security measures after a string of recent bad publicity that the site has been involved in. Thanks, partly, to my findings, Bebo already had tightened up it’s security to a satisfactory level which allowed it to develop what are known as “killer-features”, such as their Skins system and optimising their Flashbox feature (which is now called “Bebo TV”). But now, and only now have they released their latest feature which puts them in a superb position to compete with MySpace.

The Bebo Bands feature was added a mere 15 hours a go and even though I’m not in a band, I’ve had the chance to play around with it over the past while. It’s not too dis-similar to MySpaces offering, however, like everything on Bebo, it’s looks much cleaner and won’t be subject to error messages every 15 mins ala MySpace. A band profile page takes on the same layout as a normal Bebo profile and therefore bands have access to the wide range of user created skins. They can even create one themselves and offer it up to other users and all through the Bebo site as opposed to unreliable third party sites. Of course it also has band related features such as a Song Module, where people can stream songs, an Album module, where we can look at the tracklisting of their albums as well as the artwork. There’s also a groupie module which works like the Top 16 does and a tour date module where people can check out details about their latest tours. There are also the usual modules on the page such as Bebo TV where a band can stream a video to you and the blog block where the band can share their experiences with their groupies.

It will be interesting to see how MySpace react to this and whether or not they can come up with anything ground breaking in response because given the unreliable nature of MySpace, the bands feature was the only thing that has kept many users loyal to Rupert Murdoch! If Bebo Bands takes off, and I think it will, then we could very well see MySpace being sold on at a considerable loss!

My First Mugging

Published
by
Adam
on July 2, 2006
in Life, Local and Ramblings
. 5 Comments

Last Wednesday saw me being chosen for that rite of passage known as “The First Mugging”, an occassion which in todays society is now a certainty with the only variables being when, where and how much they take! On this occassion it was the park with the end result being that I was down €70 and had a phone that smelt of diseased scumbag crotch.

The trouble all the started when a foursome of inbred cocks decided to join in on our game of soccer with two of them opting to sit on the sideline, or this in case right beside the goal post where our bags and stuff were. Having just got back from the shop a few minutes earlier, my wallet and phone were just thrown on the ground which put me at an immediate disadvantage. As much as I thought I was keeping an eye on them as the goalkeeper, they still managed to slip €20 out of it, but at that moment in time I wasn’t aware of it.

It was only when one “Martin” was knocked out that things started heating up because suddenly I noticed that my phone was gone. I rang it, but to no avail. As expected, everyone denied having it until one of them said that Martin had it. He denied it until finally reaching into his pants and producing a phone which had an uncanny resemblence to my own. It was then that he told me that one of the girls by the goalpost had taken the €20 from my wallet. I went to check, but my wallet was then taken from me and €50 was swiftly swiped from it by none other than Martin!

I spent the next 15 minutes trying to guage the situtation. We outnumbered them, but who would get involved if it did come to blows? I was also thinking down the road and whether or not there’d be a fair chance of them getting their extended family after me. I was also aware that we had a number of friends scattered around the park, but calling upon them for assistance would have required shouting which would have sent the scumbags running - with my money. Martin also had my money sitting beside his balls and no sane person would want to put their hands down there so Martin would have had to hand it over himself and he came across as the guy who wouldn’t give in, even if I knocked him straight to the ground with one rage enfuelled blow which on a few occassions looked like what was going to happen as I threatened to snap at any moment! I didn’t snap though and the deformed foursome escaped with my money after it eventually became clear that I wasn’t going to get them to hand over the money voluntarily and the general concensus within our group was that I had no option other than walk away and leave it be…