poker. marketing. life
Looking to grab a bite to eat with you and yours on at 1am? Well then I recommend heading down to your nearest Abrakababra branch. Forgive me though, in all my times in the local Abrakebabra, I cannot once remember the place looking like it’s supposed to in it’s latest advertising campaign.
Surely I was never that drunk to not notice a family sitting down to a meal at 1am? Now if the ad had fights, people stealing food, vomitting and passing out it might just be believeable!
The CAO deadline is fast approaching (about 17 hours away!). The CAO is the small office located in the picturesque city of Galway that handles college applications from about 60,000 students a year. Quite a task for the nine full time members of staff! Thankfully I completed mine online about a week a go and after checking over it a few times, I’m now quite happy with it. Unfortunately, the “ah sure, we’ll do it later” stereotypical attitude of the Irish holds true when it comes to life changing decisions as well and as a result, the CAO website crashed last night - causing widespread panic amongst Irelands procrastinating teens!
Speaking of procrastinating, this day week sees my school commence its mock exams. The idea behind them is that we all get used to examination conditions and are handed out exam papers similar to the ones we’ll be getting come June. The beauty of it all is that we’re being examined on all aspects of all our courses - even the areas that we haven’t covered yet! This means that when we get our corrected tests back, the results should be less than awe-inspiring - inspiring to put in tonnes more study and devoting the next few months of your life to the way of the hermit!
Of course some people won’t be getting bad results in their mocks. These are those who have had the cop on to study over the past year. Am I one of those people? Far from it I’m afraid! Sure the Leaving is ages away… I have plenty of time to study for it! Funny that, I could have swore I said that in September about the mocks…..
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!
At 8:21 on Friday 8 March, a single Oxegen ticket was purchased by myself for the respectable price of €160. A mere 11 hours and 39 minutes later, that same ticket suddenly soared in value - Oxegen 2006 had sold out!
In the days prior to tickets going on sale, grand plans were being drawn up that would see me travelling up to Punchestown in mid-July inside a bus packed full of friends, drink and tents. Some may say (or maybe just me) that they were the finest plans ever made and that Oxegen’s record breaking sell out is a terrible crime against great plans because all of a sudden those great plans had to be scrapped and now I find myself with quite the dillema on my hands - To Sell Or Not To Sell?
The most obvious reason for me to sell the ticket would be to make some quick money and not have to worry about finding ways to get up to Punchestown until next year. eBay currently tells me that tickets are selling for around the €250 mark with “100% Feedback” sellers (sellers who have a track record of being reliable) being able to make up to €300 for one ticket! €90 is still a nice amount of profit to make on a ticket within a week however the obvious downside is that I wouldn’t have a ticket anymore for the most eagerly anticipated concert of 2006!
The most obvious reason for me to go is because I nearly paint the walls white whenever someone mentions the confirmed lineup to me! While some of the bands don’t appeal to me in the slightest (I call these the “tent bands”), I look at them as a chance to recouperate for the big guns such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, Placebo and of course the EELS with more being destined to be announced in the coming months! The only real downside to all this is that I would have to spend a lot money on things such as food, drink, tent and bus which would probably be in the guts of around €200 which is €200 that could go towards my Oktoberfest fund!
I clearly have more thinking to do on the matter, at the moment I’m actually 50-50. Things that could sway me into going would be the release of another batch that would result in my friends gettings tickets and the announcement of more good bands which would result in me going no matter what with no matter who! Things that could make me sell my ticket would be a quiet month or two in work that would mean I’d be forced to sell up in order to continue living as I do (like a drunk!). I can’t really think of anything else that would make me sell though, maybe if I found it difficult to find a group willing to take me up to Dublin that I might sell. I just don’t know, only time will tell!
About a month a go, I started upgrading Adams Rants in an attempt to make it bigger and better. However, I soon ran into some serious internal problems (you couldn’t see them) which resulted in the site not recognising me as the administrator. So one month down the line, I have mustered up the enthusiasm to work on the site and we are starting from scratch again! I have saved ALL the old posts however I think I’ll only bring back posts that people have specifically asked me to keep as because it’s a tedious process restoring the old posts!
In the month or so that I have spent contemplating whether or not to resurrect the site, a lot has happened to me! A few weeks a go, a discussion about relish (yes, relish) turned out to be a turning point for the worst in a long-term friendship which in retrospect could barely be defined as a friendship particularly due to the fact there isn’t one iota of my mind, body or soul that cares about it! It might seem to you that I don’t value friendship very highly but you couldn’t be more wrong!
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