Are you connected?
Does talk of Prince William joining Facebook, or Lily Allen blogging on MySpace, leave you baffled? Fear not! Here's our late adopter's guide to the social networking revolution
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2080312,00.html
Are you connected?
Does talk of Prince William joining Facebook, or Lily Allen blogging on MySpace, leave you baffled? Fear not! Here's our late adopter's guide to the social networking revolution
Wednesday May 16, 2007
The Guardian
This week came the news that "William Wales" had joined the social networking site Facebook. Yesterday there was much argument about whether it was a hoax or not. Would Prince William really post a profile on the net? The answer is: well, why not? After all, this is how most people his age keep tabs on their mates.
With websites such as Facebook and MySpace constantly being talked about in the media, it must be easy to feel like a 20th-century luddite if you aren't already part of the in-crowd. Here lies a great disconnect at the heart of 21st-century socialising: either you're in (and use every social networking website you can) or you're out (and don't use them at all).
It's important to remember, then, that while millions gobble up Facebook and the like, it's still a minority sport. Of course, "early adopters", drawn like magpies to the latest, shiniest things, will sign up for every new website they find, and no doubt already think Facebook old hat. But if you're one of the millions of people who feels left out, or simply left cold, by the social networking revolution, then don't worry: our guide, written by dedicated fans, will help turn you from an outcast into a social networking superstar.
Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent
Facebook
By Helen Pidd
By midday yesterday, the Facebook group I Poked Prince William had amassed 85 members. But before the tabloids get their cheque books out to buy up Mark from Northern Ireland and a bra-clad woman from London called Sally, it probably needs explaining that, in Facebook parlance, "poke" means nothing more dirty than giving someone an electronic wave. All 23 million members of Facebook are able to look up the names of fellow Facebookers and give them an interwebular nudge. If your pokee pokes you back, you can look at their full profile for a week, and they yours. This is fun, as profiles are normally private. Useful, too: how else can you check out whether this William Wales guy is for real? But mostly people like doing it because it sounds rude (indeed, one of my favourite Facebook groups is called Enough of the Poking, Let's Just Have Sex, and boasts almost 180,000 members).
But don't worry about that for now. What you really need to know is that Facebook is simply a way of keeping in touch with your friends online. Unlike MySpace, it is not a gift for stalkers and spammers, because you have a lot more control over who can find you: you can decide what comes up if someone puts your name into Facebook's search engine. Ordinarily, you can also see a thumbnail of someone's profile picture, and a list of people they are friends with.
The latter function means that Facebook is like a souped-up, free version of Friends Reunited. Wondering if I'm the Helen Pidd you went to school with and can't tell from the little photo on my page? The number of people from Morecambe High School I'm friends with will tell you I am, and save you the shame of poking the wrong person.
Still confused? When you join up, you first create a profile. This includes a carefully chosen picture, titbits about one's life, a facility for uploading and sharing an unlimited number of photos, a "status" function that sends out a one-line alert to all of your friends telling them what you're up to (eg "Helen needs to get a life"), and a public "wall". All your friends can see what people write on your wall. This important fact is often forgotten: at a party on Saturday I had to reprimand a friend for having a nauseatingly saucy conversation with someone on his public wall.
About that party ... it was organised by Michael, someone I went to school with. He invited 95 of his Facebook friends. When I arrived at the do, I saw a guy from the year below me at school who I hadn't seen since the last day of exams. "I didn't know you were still mates with Michael," I said. Turns out he wasn't really: they had lost touch and found each other again on Facebook.
MySpace
By Laura Barton
There comes a time when you have to choose a side. Good or evil. Blur or Oasis. Marmite or peanut butter. In 2005, after a long period of social-networking neutrality, I chose MySpace.
Like all the others, MySpace is a social networking site, but the difference is that its social glue is music. Along with normal people's profiles, bands have their own pages, maintained by themselves or their record company, where they can upload examples of their music, and news about upcoming shows and releases.
This has presented a new way for music fans (and record labels) to find music, and serves as a worthy alternative to listening to radio, attending gigs, reading the music press or knowing what is on general release. It also provides a way for musicians to communicate more directly with their fans. Lily Allen, for example, blogs regularly on her MySpace - just this week she wrote openly of being in "a sea of tears" and researching liposuction and gastric bypass surgery after people had made ludicrous comments about her weight in the press.
Elsewhere, you'll find numerous "celebrity" sites that have been constructed either by the celebrities themselves or "fans": from Noel Edmonds to Jennifer Aniston, to Barack Obama, Tony Blair and George Bush. Last year, the Conservative party had to deny that David Cameron's MySpace (www.myspace.com/david_cameron) was a crude attempt to win the youth vote.
MySpace is a little older than some of the other networking sites - it was founded in 2003 and is now the the fifth most popular website in any language. It acquires some 230,000 new users every day and, as of last October, boasted an estimated 106m accounts. In 2005 it was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580m (£290m), a development that caused many users to bridle.
Signing up via the MySpace homepage is relatively easy. Designing your profile page is somewhat harder, as it involves making some potentially tricky decisons: choosing a profile picture, a quote, and a song, whether you want to "pimp" your page (ie, decorate it). You will also need to supply a little blurb about yourself, your hobbies, the music, films, books you like, who you'd like to meet, and choose your "top friends".
The technology feels fairly clunky but I find that curiously attractive. The site has a range of functions: email, bulletins, blogs, friend comments, photographs, groups, videos and music. Other members can request your friendship (and you theirs), though you can set your profile to private if you really want to keep the busybodies out.
It might seem, I suppose, an odd thing to spill out so many personal details on a website, to conduct private conversations in public, to chat to unknown people in Arizona just because you both like the Moldy Peaches. But I rather like the fact that in this impersonal city where I now live, where no one looks each other in the eye or speaks to strangers on the bus, there is all this warmth bubbling away online.
Bebo
By Natalie Hanman
"Bright, colourful and cheesy" is how one Beboer - a Bebo.com user - describes this social-networking site. Which might be why it has a reputation for attracting even younger users than its online competitors, with most of its visitors (30%) aged 18 to 24.
Bebo, founded in 2005, quickly expanded to enable sociable young web users to do all they could possibly desire: from uploading photos, posting comments and sending emails, to quizzes, picture slide-shows and blogs.
The whiteboard feature on a user's easily personalised profile is a particular pull, on which other users can draw colourful pictures - typically detailing what your friends got up to the night before. Now, according to the latest weekly audience figures from Hitwise, Bebo is the most popular website in the "net communities and chat" category, just beating MySpace to the top spot. A recent deal with online music store 7Digital, plus the appointment of Angel Gambino, former vice-president of commercial, strategy and digital media at MTV, is all part of its push into the music side of social networking, with plans to allow users to share and download their favourite tracks. In the words of a Bebo spokesman: "It's much more intuitive and engaging than Barack Obama having a MySpace profile."
Twitter
By Bobbie Johnson
Twitter is much simpler than the other social-networking sites that fill up the internet. All it asks is one thing - "What are you doing?" - and you answer, either via your mobile or your computer. Twitter then tells all your friends, via a text on their mobiles or a message online, and they send their own messages back. That's it.
At first, using Twitter is like walking into a noisy party where you don't know anybody, filled with confusing chatter. Too many friends and you quickly drown in the minutiae of other people's lives.
But once you start getting used to it, it's more like dipping your finger into a fast-flowing river: things fly by and you catch hold of the ones you want.
For some, it's just blogging for the lazy. Others use it to message their mates en masse. Like all these networks, Twitter's real strengths only appear when you have the right friends. Still, with the service doubling in size every few weeks, it won't be long until somebody you know is using it already. Just one thing - when you sign up, make sure you add me to your friends list, yeah?
Second Life
By Aleks Krotoski
You may have heard of Second Life, a brave new world taking the internet by storm, promising to change your view of reality, make you a millionaire and give you powerful tools to realise your full potential. Behind the headlines lies a compelling space that may change how we use the internet.
When you join Second Life - which you can do for free - you create your digital persona, or avatar. This little person can be personalised as you see fit. You can choose everything from the size of your nose to the colour of your nails.
Inside Second Life, which has six million users, everything looks pretty much like the outside world: there are clubs, shops, universities, offices and theatres. Unlike most online spaces, where you interact with a website on your own, you're surrounded by other people, in avatar form, experiencing the same things at the same time. You can sit down together on sofas and have coffee and a chat (using either your voice or your keyboard), go to a festival and dance among the throngs to the music being streamed live - for real - from a bar in Los Angeles, or discuss the finer points of the art in a gallery.
What makes it special is what people have done with it. As a world built for and by an international population of adults with an average age of 33, the space is littered with innumerable examples of superb interactive design by real-world architects, musicians, artists and others. As more services arrive from the outside, it has become a new way for consumers to go online to browse and buy, teach and train, socialise and surf.
Second Life is a place for self-expression and for hanging out with friends, limited only by the boundaries of your imagination. Aleks Krotoski is studying towards a PhD at the University of Surrey, exploring the social networks of Second Life. Almost every other website
The sheer, unabashed popularity of MySpace, Facebook and other big social sites has been impossible for the rest of the web to ignore. The result is that right now almost every major site is trying desperately to build some kind of social-network element in order to appear hip.
This desperate rush to create a network for every occasion is reminiscent of the dotcom boom, when slapping a web address on any half-baked idea was a licence to print money. But soon you'll see it everywhere: newspapers such as the Sun have already joined in, niche-interest sites are grabbing hold of it with both hands and it won't be long before you see it on the BBC website.
Sometimes the social web works brilliantly. Flickr.com, the photo website, is a well-regarded pioneer because it served a brilliant purpose: making it simple to share your pictures with family and friends.
Often, though, new networks seem like the handiwork of some internet Frankenstein with pound signs in place of brain cells. The number of "me too" services and rip-offs is growing faster than it is possible to count.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, have developed their own network for pets, the appropriately named SNIF (Social Networking in Fur). With a simple chip in your pet's collar, you can track down appropriate canine chums - or stay away from the dogs you don't like.
In the longer term, though, the success stories could be the ones where brainiacs learn to put the power of social networks to help users, rather than just monopolise their time. One example is the UK-based internet radio service Last.fm, which matches your taste in music to other people and uses that "attention data" to play you new tracks by groups it thinks you'll like.
Who was it that made the audacious claim that "there's no such thing as society"? She obviously didn't use MySpace.
· The following amendment was made on Wednesday May 16 2007. MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580m, which is equivalent to £290m, not £29m as we said in this article. This has been corrected.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2080463,00.html
The rules
The dos and don'ts of social networking online
Helen Pidd
Wednesday May 16, 2007
The Guardian
· If you are planning on committing, or being accused of, a newsworthy crime at any point in the future, don't set up a profile on any site. Us muck-raking journalists will be all over it before anyone has even raised your bail.
· Remember that it is quite common for potential employers to look you up on social networking sites to see if you are really the sophisticated professional you created for the purposes of your CV. I recently looked up a work-experience person on Facebook: he was naked in his profile picture. You know who you are.
· Remember that there are certain things you cannot ever change in your personal profile after you sign up. Why, for instance, did I ever think it was a good idea to call myself Piddophile on MySpace?
· If you're going to decline someone's offer of friendship, especially on Facebook, where it is rare for random people to get in touch, don't write back saying, "Do I know you?????" You have probably slept with them. Just ignore them and hope they go away.
· Politicians: if you need to put up a Facebook or MySpace profile to promote your policies, you are screwed.
· Don't invite work colleagues into your online life. Remember that old friends throwing about playground nicknames or recalling that time you wet yourself on the school bus may not seem so funny in a work context.
· Don't start sending messages or comments via Facebook or MySpace to people with whom you previously corresponded by email. That extra click or two to read your one-line witticisms is annoying.
· Remember that work IT departments see everything
· Another Facebook one: don't discuss private things on public walls. And it's bad form to flirt on other people's walls too.
· If you split up with someone with whom you are also friends on MySpace, don't remove them from your "Top Friends" section. It hurts.
· Never, ever, look up exes on any social-networking sites. That hurts, too.
Helen Pidd
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2080314,00.html
'I don't need long-lost m@tes'
Patrick Barkham
Wednesday May 16, 2007
The Guardian
The day before the latest manifestation of our heir to the throne's premature mid-life crisis, a 32-year-old friend emailed me. "Have you joined Facebook yet?" he asked. Prince William allegedly signing up to a social-networking website so he can converse with his toff pals is about what you'd expect from him. But my mate has a busy job and a vibrant social life.
"No, I have not joined Facebook yet," I (nearly) replied, "because I am no longer an adolescent, my development has not been arrested, I don't need long-lost m@tes from nursery school, I don't want to join the Drunken Text Message Appreciation Society, I don't have time to check my 'newsfeed' for vital titbits such as 'William Wales updated his profile. He is now looking for whatever he can get (3.56am)' and I certainly don't fancy spending out-of-work hours 'relaxing' behind another computer screen."
"You just don't get social networking, do you?" sighs another thirtysomething Facebook friend.
Incase uz didn no, I do. Like most "ppl" I'm socially networking every minute I'm awake, using newfangled contraptions (email, text message, carrier pigeon) to arrange and enhance real face time. I don't need Facebook time.
Facebook, MySpace and Bebo are just about acceptable if you're too young to enter a pub. If you're not, and want to do the online equivalent of hanging outside the school gates, go ahead. But they'll be sniggering at you. "My sister's a teacher and she said her pupils who are all on it thought it was hilarious that I should be on it at my age," admits a 31-year-old Facebook addict.
Online oldsters: the internet is robbing you of real life. If you're single, every second spent perusing other people's photos on Facebook is a second less to catch the eye of a gorgeous passerby in the street. If your mind-numbing job plonks you behind a computer all day, every minute spent on Facebook is a minute lost to do something about your stultifying situation. And every sensory-deprived hour spent social networking online is an hour less to savour the thrilling marvel of the living, breathing, pulsating real world.
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M@rconectado;
Norwich, G(reat) B(ebo);
19/5/07
... Un espejo en el SUR.
