Virtual Shadows

Exciting or what!! Almost war against Facebook!

“MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. We’ve confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining. Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining. Google will be making an announcement today. MySpace and Six Apart join Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle as announced Google partners.” Read more….

And what is OpenSocial? Zen has given a nice description in her blog. I have taken an extract… “OpenSocial is a set of APIs that handle three different kinds of user data: profiles, social graph (who your friends are) and activities (the stuff of the Facebook news feeds.) And the language of these APIs are standard HTML and Javascript. Any application written for OpenSocial will work on any partner social network – any OpenSocial “container”. That means developers need only write an app once, and it can get used on any of the networks involved, like Orkut and LinkedIn. Basically, if the more social network sites that adopt OpenSocial, the more open the whole thing gets.”

An old work colleague of mine from Novell in Sweden sent me a ‘connect to Plaxo‘. Well I’d never heard of them before, seemed something similar to Linked-in, but in fact was much more than this. Their product connects up address books, links into your social networks too. I haven’t tested it yet, but found this video advertising their methods that is quite fun… take a look.

I like this article in Time. Pretty much to the mark I think, and maybe in its own way gives us some insight into the future; that is not so bad as is made out by all those articles that speculate on the negative consequences of social networking.

“Currently, for web users over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming in second, after search engines. Not so for 18- to 24-year-olds, for whom social networks rank first, followed by search engines, then web-based e-mail — with porn sites lagging behind in fourth. If you chart the rate of visits to social-networking sites against those to adult sites over the last two years, there appears to be a strong negative correlation (i.e., visits to social networks go up as visits to adult sites go down). It’s a leap to say there’s a real correlation there, but if there is one, then I’d bet it has everything to do with Gen Y’s changing habits: they’re too busy chatting with friends to look at online skin.” Read more….

I must say there are some things that I am not sorry to say goodbye too….the British soap tv series are such a bore… what a waste of time, all those 1000s of people just sitting there 3-4 times a week vegetating their life away in front of the tv… good!

“Today EastEnders (the famous British soap) is menaced by something far more dangerous than a rival show and way deadlier than any serial killer dreamed up in a script meeting: the digital revolution that’s wreaking global havoc in industries as diverse as broadcasting, newspapers, magazines, film and music. Challenged by technologies that allow anyone to read news, watch TV or listen to music on a bedroom computer (or to make these things oneself for consumption by other people on the same computer), these businesses are frantically scrambling to reinvent themselves. EastEnders must now fight for an audience not just with other terrestrial channels but with cable and satellite stations, while younger Brits spend more and more of their time trawling online sites like YouTube and Facebook. Mark Byford, the BBC’s deputy director general and the Corporation’s head of journalism, says there’s a noticeable “falling away” of large swathes of TV viewers who are “under 35 and especially under 25.” The BBC derives 78.5% of its $8.5 billion income from an annual license fee of $275 payable by any household equipped to receive TV; in return, it’s obliged to cater to all ages and socio-economic groups. “In a world of fragmentation, a world of more choice, of a revolution in how people are accessing content, one of our big, big challenges is to hold that reach,” Byford says. Read more….