Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Cafe World, Dragon Wars, Vampire Wars, FishVille. Just some of the games whose notifications are overwhelming the home pages of even the most socially awkward of Facebook users. A quick walk through any college library will reveal scores of screens with the tell-tale signs of various farm animals, waiters and roller-coasters lighting up the area for all to see. Even the most casual of Facebook users find it difficult to escape from the clutches of the ongoing Social Game revolution and quite a few have found themselves in a perpetual cycle that consists of moments of pure therapeutic goodness, swiftly followed by spells of inconsolable guilt as you realise that you’ve planned an entire day around your harvesting cycle / cooking times. You solider on though. You’re forced to, lest a friend leapfrog you in the leaderboards.

It can’t just be me.

In fact, I know it’s not just me. I’ve invested (read as: pissed away) days into these games. In Mafia Wars I was a latecomer and was trying to play catch up on those trendy early adapters whose lives had already changed for the worse. The final nail in the coffin of my Gangsta’ career came when I stumbled in the door one night and found myself without any energy to complete Bank Jobs and the like. Out came the credit card. As a complete degenerate gambler (certainly when drunk anyway), I’m not unaccustomed to taking out the credit card at 4am and having a desperate punt on anything from the X-Factor – which I don’t watch – to 40 game accumulators across every sport on offer. I’ve never woken up feeling as guilty after losing money on ludicrous betting as I did after spending €70 on Gold Coins! I wouldn’t mind but the eventual effect it had on my character was akin to upgrading the engine in a Mini… that’s in a race against a F16 fighter jet. I vowed never to play a game on Facebook again and I admit that I briefly felt somewhat superior to those I could see in the libraries feverishly clicking away their lives because I had the good sense to break the addiction.

Then Cafe World came along.

I happen to work in the hospitality industry so I justified my first foray into the world of restaurant ownership as an investigation to see if it was “authentic”. Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel for excuses! Much to my delight, the game was about as authentic as an autographed photo of Jesus. I had hoped for micro-management of costs and the freedom to create your own meals but instead I was given cartoon characters that flipped burgers on a moldy old stove every 5 minutes. There seemed to be nothing going for the game – which was good, given that I was desperately hoping that I wouldn’t get sucked into a world of misery for a second time. I was just about to abandon ship and return to normality when I spotted the leaderboard at the bottom of the screen. What followed was something that could only be described as the most peculiar time of my life as my online existence deteriorated into trying my utmost to try win what was to develop into a bitter feud between two restaurateurs.

There was no prize. Not even pride was on the line as I didn’t know the person I was entangled with that particularly well. For some reason the mere sight of a big number was enough to motivate us to plough hours and hours into slicing and dicing day in, day out. At some point, the process of roasting and toasting various meals was no longer fun. My restaurant started to look more like a factory than an eatery as I tried to make my formerly beloved creation more efficient in a desperate attempt to hold onto my lead. My moves were quickly matched. It can’t have been much fun for my competitor either given that I was starting to plan my “cooking” around my day of lectures and work. I’m ashamed to admit, but I will, that I was once asked to go into work because someone called in sick but I declined purely on the basis that my 6 Roast Beefs would be spoilt and I’d surrender my lead. It had to stop. For the love of God it HAD to stop!!

And then I got word. “I surrender” was the gist of it. I was skeptical though. I was only too aware of the possibility of being tricked into leaving my guard down and being left helpless as they rode off with the prize (which was what again?). It turns out that they weren’t that sick and twisted though (had they done that I would have been positively bouncing off the walls for weeks!). I could return to my normal life i.e. the one that didn’t involve logging into Facebook at every available opportunity to see if I could better utilise my fictitious cafe.

Never again.

I just came across this study after browsing the epicenter of social media news, Mashable, for the first time in about 2 years.

Some people have described the results of the study as jaw-dropping. It found, among other things, that 57% of people believe their activities on social-networking sites are narcissistic in nature. Is that really “jaw-dropping” though? Many social networking sites encourage participation through regular status updates and lets face it, most peoples lives aren’t bubbling with excitement and edge-of-your-seat drama, so they inject a measure of creative storytelling to the mix.

Does that say something about the people who use social networking sites i.e. the fact that people twist and contort the facts of their lives to appear as being more interesting? I wouldn’t necessarily classify this as being narcissistic though. Certainly, if you just look at one side of the coin (in this case the online aspect) then we could quickly come to the conclusion that everybody is seeking out that lime light with their own selfish agenda. However, these traits don’t translate over to real life interactions though, that is to say that the vast majority of people don’t over-exaggerate every detail of their lives when interacting with them in-person.

Facebook, as an example, is a social playground. When we start assuming that everything that happens in this playground is an accurate representation of the characteristics of “Generation Y”, things start to get skewed. Yes, the internet is serious business, but at the same time it shouldn’t be used to stereotype an entire generation given that we still do exist outside this particular medium of communication.

So, as you can probably notice, I’ve changed the design of my site slightly. It looks slightly better and it’s easier for me to create new “insightful” posts! Yeah, right! Anyway, the flipside to this new design is that now when I search for my name on Google, I’m nowhere to be seen! Previously, my Bebo page was the second entry for Adam Murphy listed on Google!

In trying to figure out why it disappeared, I noticed that the new design didn’t have my “Social” section with links to my profiles on various sites. It’s strange how my link from Adams Rants to my Bebo profile is what appears to have warranted such a high ranking for my Bebo page, yet Adams Rants doesn’t seem to be appearing in any of my searches for “Adam Murphy”.

I’m now a mission to become the highest ranked Adam Murphy on Google by practicing some search engine optimisation as well as purchasing a domain name “adam-murphy.info”. A little vain? Perhaps. But it’s always nice to have your name high up in the search engines!

I noticed this a few days a go and was surprised that the guys over at Mashable didn’t pick up on it. The map, which is accessible here, allows users to check who has been visiting their profile within the last 24 hours and where they hail from.

This has been a feature that many web-security experts have been recommending be implemented on Bebo and other social networks for a long time. I would be inclined to agree with them as a feature such a this allows more transparency and can potentially cut down on the phenomenon which has become known as “Bebo Stalking”. Think about it, would you hypothetically stalk someone if they knew you were doing it? Most likely not.

It may seem like an innocent addition but such a feature gives users increased information about their profile which can be used to keep them safe but what I really like about it is that it also adds to the Bebo experience as a whole. It’s nice to be able to see who’s been visiting your profile and by using the Google Maps interface they can potentially add more features to it in the future such as a social connections map which could map out how many of your visitors are connected to each other.

The only complaint I have about the addition is that users have the option to set themselves as private and are actually set to private by default. I would have preferred if all users under the age of 18 were set to private (and were warned about the dangers of setting their profiles to public) while over 18 year olds should automatically have their profiles set to public. This, I believe, would further add to the Bebo experience and enhance the effectiveness of Bebos security.

Many moons a go, I quickly slapped together a quick guide describing how to download music from the Bebo bands music service. The article was criticised for being rather vague, and rightly so. So I have decided to update the guide and even include some step by step pictures to help you.

STEP 1
First you must navigate to a bands profile page. Tonnes of major label bands and unsigned artists are available to choose via the Music Tab on the Bebo header. For this example I’m using the Transformers Movie Soundtrack page.

STEP 2
Once you are on the Bands profile page, scroll down and you will see a box labelled “Songs”. Here you can look at what songs are available to listen to. If you wish, you can click the “play” button to preview the songs before you download them.

STEP 3
Now you must right click in any blank space on the page and click “View Page Source” (in Internet Explorer it’s labelled “View Source”)

This will open up a window full of text which is probably alien to you. In actual fact it’s a programming language called HTML which is the language in which all websites are created but we don’t really care about its lifestory, instead we simply want to find out where the songs are located within this code.

STEP 4

Press CTRL+F (i.e press CTRL and while it’s pushed down press “F”) and a search box should appear at the bottom of the screen as shown (in Internet Explorer it will appear in the middle of the screen). In this box we type in “.mp3″ (without the quotes) and we are then taken to the section of the code which contains the information about the location of the music.

STEP 5
Now that we know where the .mp3’s are, we simply copy the address of the music file by selecting the area of text shown below and copying and pasting it into the address bar at the top of our browser window.

After pasting it into the address bar, hit ENTER and a dialog box should come up asking you where you wish to save the song.

STEP 6
Now that you have the song that you want downloaded, you can quickly download the rest of the available songs by searching for .mp3 and clicking “Find Next” which will automatically find the next song.

I wish you all the best of luck and I hope this revised tutorial will help those who found my first attempt difficult to follow!

Many schools, colleges and workplaces have taken it upon themselves to block access to social networking sites such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace, not to mention thousands of other “questionable” sites that they don’t want you looking at. Fortunately, there is a way around this and that is to use a proxy. To quickly explain how a proxy works, you type what website you want to look at and it downloads it to its server and then what it downloads is displayed on your screen, tricking any content filtering software into thinking that you’re looking at a non-blocked website! I have included a small utility which refers to an extensive list of these proxies when browsing. Enjoy!

28 Jan 07 – Some people reported that this doesn’t work any longer. This is not the case, I have just tried it and it does still work as described below. Enjoy!

The recent launch of Bebo bands wasn’t as high profile as I thought it could have been, with very few big bands officially supporting it. However, independent and little known bands have siezed the opportunity to make a name for themselves. Unfortunately, the Bebo Bands platform does not yet allow users to “download” the songs, instead only allowing them to be streamed. Thankfully though, the songs call on a piece of javascript in order to be played and that piece of javascript gives the full location of the .mp3 that was uploaded! So for anybody that’s familiar with HTML, head over to the ‘Songs’ section of a bands bebo profile and view it’s source. If you don’t want to sift through it, simply search for .mp3 within the code. For those who haven’t a notion about what I’m on about, I shall explain it.

Once you have found a band you like, click on the “Songs” tab at the top of the screen, this will bring you a page listing all the songs that that band have chosen to upload. Now that you’re on this page, right-click anywhere on the screen and a menu will appear beside your cursor. Navigate down towards the option “View Source” and click on it. A window should pop up with lots of confusing text in it. This is called HTML, a computer programming language used to create webpages. But we aren’t interested in that at the moment, instead we’ll go look for the MP3s. In the top left of that window, there’s a tab called “Edit”, click that and navigate towards “Find”. This will launch another window with a field in it that allows you to type your search terms. In this type “.mp3″ (without the quotes). Doing this will bring you to the mp3s within the code. Copy and paste the full address of this mp3 (everything within the ‘ ‘) and open up your web browser. In the address bar, paste the address and press go. It should ask you to save the file. To move onto the next .mp3, simply click “Find Next” within the Notepad search window.

Hope that’s of some use to you. Good luck!

PS: This does not work on the MySpace music player because that uses Flash.

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.

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!

Has anyone noticed that Bebo seems to be a bit quiet as of late? With Summer fast approaching, so are the college exams. College students make up, I’m guessing, the majority of the Bebo userbase. In recent weeks I’ve noticed that there aren’t as many messages being forwarded or comments being left on people’s profiles which is no doubt due to the imminent exams, some of which have already started. Once these exams are over, I doubt that Bebo will be able to re-coup the students who used Bebo as a pastime to overcome the boredom of coursework. Neither will they be able to retain those who will be having an active social life throughout the Summer although I reckon some will choose to keep in contact with friends using Bebo. With a massive decrease in the active userbase, it will be interesting to see how Michael Birch and co manage to cope with the inevitable fall in advertising revenue. Maybe some of the 15 staff brought in to moderate pictures and profiles will have to be laid off? Whatever happens, it’s definitely going to be a lot quieter over the next few months.

Recently, YouTube launched a slightly revamped site with a few new features here and there. For this who don’t know, YouTube is a digital video repository where users can upload videos and then share them with their friends. For the past few months, a workaround allowed Bebo users to use videos hosted by YouTube as their flashbox. However, with this recent update, they appear to have fixed this workaround which has rendered many of the most popular flashboxes on Bebo obselete! The Flashbox feature has always been a big Bebo attraction so needless to day, the update dealt a big blow to Bebo users, some of whom may find Bebo less exciting without this ability!

Thankfully Bebo have been busy working on ways to make peoples profiles more unique and have struck a goldmine with their user-submitted skins. I don’t use the word goldmine lightly either! By allowing users to submit their own skins they will save money on having to hire graphic designers to develop skins for them as well as ensuring that there will be an almost endless amount of skins for users to choose from in the future. This is one of the many advantages that Bebo has over MySpace in that skins are just a one click job. It looks good and is an excellent idea on behalf of Michael Birch and co.

To summarise, I think that the hype of Bebo is dying down. The next few months will paint a realistic picture of Bebos actual popularity which I predict won’t be as impressive as others many think. They have been making efforts to innovate their site, however, as time goes on they will find it progressively more difficult to innovate for a wider userbase which will result in the decline of Bebo. When will this happen? I can’t say right now, but we need only look at the social networking sites of the past that have declined in recent months due to Bebo for us to come to the conclusion that soon another site will come a long and take the internet by storm!