Social Networking
Review of “How to Make 80million Friends and Influence people”
In the article “How to make 80 million Friends and influence people”, the writer, Simon Garfield is reporting on the cultural phenomena that is social networking. Social networking was originally set up in the late 1990s in order for friends to stay in touch with each other over long distances. Michael Birch is the founder of Bebo, one of the fastest growing social networking sites today. He set up the site in January 2005 when he and his family moved from London to California, as a way to keep in touch with friends in the UK.
When the article was written, Bebo was “the sixth most popular site in the UK, bigger than AOL, Amazon and bbc.co.uk.”
According to the Sunday Independent, Bebo is now the “most popular site in Ireland”
Social networking is a success due to the profile of its users. Members are generally secondary school students or young adults between the ages of 18 and 30. The attraction of social networking sites is simple, according to Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia University, “people like to express themselves, and they are curious about other people”.
On sites such as Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Classmates, Xanga, MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, hi5, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Sconex, CrushSpot, Multiply, Orkut, Tagworld, Tagged, Piczo, Mooble, WAYN, ASmallWorld, MyYearBook, Cyworld, ProfileHeaven, Fropper and EveryonesConnected, people can link their pages to their friends’ pages, to their friends’ friend’s pages and so on. In this way, a person’s ability to be “popular” has increased exponentially, and the amount of “hits” or “views” their profile receives is proof of this.
On a simpler level, social networking sites allow friends to share their photos with each other, leave comments and messages and to update their social groups, however big or small, on events in their lives. Setting up a page is easily mastered, “there is no tricky programming to learn, no software to load. You click on a template and receive instant gratification” and the rewards are enormous; cheap, easy communication with a wide circle of friends and peers from the comfort of your own home.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Article; How to make 80 million friends and influence people, by Simon Garfield, guardian.co.uk, Sunday June 18 2006 00.10 BST
How to make 80 million friends and influence people
It is a new internet revolution being joined by hundreds of thousands every day. Called 'Me Media', is has sparked an explosion of sites like Bebo and Facebook where users generate the content - creating their own space online. How did this phenomenon change the face of social interaction and help 'rock the world' of a generation. Simon Garfield reports
In the last few days a long-haired Englishman with a wife and two children received a number of unsolicited and erratically spelt love letters on his internet homepage. 'BEBO IS SOOOO ADDICTIVE! Bebo bebo bebo!!!' wrote Philip Lee, 16, from County Tyrone. 'Thnx 2u, I'm goin 2 fail my GCSE's.' 'Omigod thanks so much for bebo its sooo class!' wrote 14 year-old Danielle Enright. 'Bebo rocks!' said Sarah K, another teenager from Ireland.
The object of their affection is Michael Birch, 35, who founded Bebo with his wife Xochi in January 2005 after they had moved from London to California. In the last year 25 million people have joined it, most still at school. Like Yahoo and Google before it, Bebo is a word that has gone from meaningless to meaning everything to its users in a dramatically short period, and there are so many of them that soon the computerised world may have no one between 11 and 18 who is not a fanatic. Bebo is currently the sixth most popular site in the UK, bigger than AOL, Amazon and bbc.co.uk.
It is part of an internet phenomenon known as social networking, something which has replaced, or at least supplemented, real-life meeting up. In the real world, social networking often involves travelling, drinking, personal digital assistants and business cards, but the internet has simplified the process. Members of Bebo, most of whom learnt to use a computer as soon as the bars on their cots were dismantled, can do a lot of the usual internet things on their Bebo homepages like uploading music, videos and photos, and updating their blog, but for the first time they can do it all in one place. In the old days, teenagers would tie up the phone lines all night, or amass huge bills on their mobiles. MSN instant messaging - onlinewritten conversation - changed that, but words alone can get boring in a multimedia age. So imagine the possibilities if anyone of any age could create their own webpage for free, and include in it almost everything that turned them on; and imagine if they were instantly linked to everyone else. Bebo members can not only contact all their friends and all their friends' friends, but also all the friends of friends of friends. And in this way the internet is beginning to join itself up. If you had a couple of spare years you would still not run out of photos to click on and new friends to make. It is like a giant digital chain letter with no downside if you break it, beyond the feeling that maybe you should get out more.
But we don't get out more. Not long ago, most of us felt we were a part of the online community just by configuring our broadband connection, and we were happy to stare passively at screens. But now we are eager to claim part of it as our own, hence the adopted name for this trend: Me Media. And there is no social stigma attached.
Bebo is a relative upstart in the social networking community, but it certainly isn't the last. Inevitably, Bebo has friends: MySpace, Friendster, Classmates, Xanga, MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, hi5, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Sconex, CrushSpot, Multiply, Orkut, Tagworld, Tagged, Piczo, Mooble, WAYN, ASmallWorld, MyYearBook, Cyworld, ProfileHeaven, Fropper and EveryonesConnected.
Michael Birch's original internet plans were aimed at an older age group - thirtysomethings - but he soon learnt that social networking online depends on finding a focus based on more than age - a classroom, for instance, or a particular hobby. 'I wanted it to be a place where I could exchange photos and keep in touch with my family in England,' he said on Friday from his home in San Francisco. 'But you can't control who finds websites popular. Teenagers are always the early adopters online because they have more time on their hands and less money - and social networks are free.'
And so Bebo spread entirely by word of mouth in schools and colleges, to the point where his site now has 100 million page views every day. Bebo is just a refinement of Ringo, Birch's previous attempt at a social networking site that he built in 2003 and sold not long after it reached 400,000 members. And that grew out of BirthdayAlarm.com, a successful birthday reminder service using eCards that currently has 40m users. Birch bought the name Bebo from someone else. 'When we planned the site, all the cool, short names were taken,' he says. ' But after we bought it we invented an acronym for it: blog early blog often.'
It could be that Bebo and co have nothing much to do with social networking in the established sense. Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia University in New York, recently told the New Yorker that it had more to do with 'voyeurism and exhibitionism. People like to express themselves, and they are curious about other people.' That is to say, it's just a basic human instinct.
On a practical level, the real reason Bebo has taken off so fast is because it can be mastered by a 12-year-old. There is no tricky programming to learn, no software to load. You click on a template and receive instant gratification. Friendster was the first of the social networking sites to capitalise on the one-click advances in technology and experience the sort of rapid exponential growth that is crucial to success on the internet. But Friendster is no longer considered the hippest kid in the playground.
With Bebo, even someone slightly older than the target market will have no trouble joining up. I gave the registration site my first name, and before I could give my second I read: 'Safety Tip: If you are under the age of 21 in particular, we strongly recommend entering only the first letter of your last name.' Then it's your age and as much of your address as you want to supply, a username and password, and after that it's the fun stuff - personal descriptions, what makes you happy and scared, and simple uploads of anything already stored on your computer. At the end you're asked if you want to feature on the main Bebo homepage, which is where I found a 17-year-old student called Kirsty Mackay passing the time online with her friends in Aberdeen.
On her homepage, Mackay expresses a preference for R&B and 'chick flicks', and displays more than a hundred photos of herself on holiday and at parties. She told me she had joined four months ago after a friend had seen funny pictures of her on someone else's Bebo site. 'So I went to look, and I found out a lot of my friends had Bebo pages. I thought it was a good way of keeping in touch with friends I may have lost track with over the years without the cost of phoning or texting them.' She said she particularly liked the funny comments people left after looking at her pictures.
A few hours after messaging Mackay, I went to some friends for dinner. I told them what I was writing about, but they hadn't heard of Bebo. We went upstairs to the computer, and their 12-year-old daughter was on her own Bebo site, communicating with Bebo friends. Her music preferences were 'kelly clarkson!! also that song in titanic rocks! n black eyed peas some of it n sum girls aloud stuff n hilary duff and most of the songs in Grease.'
One of the wonders of Bebo is that so many people join as themselves, albeit a slightly more glamorous version. Kirsty Mackay thought Bebo seemed safe enough as 'it didn't have any of your personal details on it'. But in any large open network the risks of abuse are considerable. Anyone can pretend to be someone else. Many schools have written to parents warning of risks, suggesting they should limit the personal information disclosed, and report incidents of online bullying. 'The web may blur the line between exercises of imagination, fancy and wishful thinking on the one hand, and outright deception on the other,' Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn told me. 'Then there is the phenomenon of fiction becoming reality, as people contour themselves to the persona they have created, perhaps on the web. '
Birch believes we are only at the beginning of things. Social networking sites 'are becoming much more of a utility over time rather than being a pure gimmick', he told the website Online Personals Watch. 'They're actually providing a genuine benefit. For example, Bebo is a cultural phenomenon in Ireland. A Beboer contacted us from Ireland and told us that before Bebo, the folks in his small town were not getting along. Then everyone independently joined Bebo, and got to know each other and now there's a community spirit in the town pub that wasn't there before.' In other words, young people are exploiting the ideal way of communicating with each other: socially awkward and self-conscious in the real world, fluent in the online world.
Birch secured $15m in venture capital funding, an investment that will increase Bebo's visibility in the United States, where, compared to this country, it is a lightweight. In two weeks the money will help him launch Bebo Bands, an additional product that will enable members to share their own music online the way they currently do on MySpace. It has taken investors and the traditional media a while to catch up with online social networking, but they are now increasingly eager to take a slice of a hugely lucrative market. Last week YouthNoise, a network of young people interested in social change with only 120,000 members, raised $2.5m in funding; two weeks earlier Friendster raised an additional $3.1m. With one swoop, investors and purchasers acquire what media people like to call 'a cultural on-ramp', an entree into an expressive and affluent young world, a world traditionally suspicious of voyeurs and multinational conglomerates. As with established media, the money to be made comes from advertising. On Bebo there are no adverts on a user's homepage but as soon as you click on the photos or your mail there are enticing links to Sony and Nokia.
Bebo remains privately owned. Not so MySpace, which last year was bought, along with its parent company, by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580m. At the moment this looks like the bargain of the century. In April, Nielsen NetRatings recorded 38.4m unique visitors to MySpace, up from 8.2m only a year before. There are more than 80m members.
MySpace made headlines in Britain a few weeks ago when Sandi Thom, a Scottish singer, had a No 1 single with 'I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair)'. Her success was a triumph of how to advertise to young people without making them feel they're being sold anything. 'Viral marketing' is the digital version of word-of-mouth. The Arctic Monkeys also established themselves on MySpace. Thom was not an unsigned singer when she broadcast via her MySpace site from a basement in south London but created one of those strange social phenomena in which tens of thousands of people believe simultaneously that they are the first and only ones to discover something new and 'real'. In fact, EMI had sent hundreds of thousands of email flyers in advance of the webcast, alerting a potential market.
But MySpace is far more than an advertising billboard; or, rather, it is an advertising billboard for everyone. A search for bands beginning with S will throw up Same Time Tomorrow (rock/emo/pop), SRT (punk/rock/Christian rap) and David Sinclair (rock/blues), the latter a three-piece unit led by the experienced music writer for the Times, the Independent and the Word. Sinclair is 53, and was happy to find that MySpace was not just for people with acne. He joined last September, and his songs have since attracted more than 1,300 plays. He has also found that numbers at his live shows have swelled with MySpace members. 'The community of dads' bands is normally quite hidden, but on MySpace there are hundreds of thousands of them,' Sinclair told me. His 16-year-old son's band, Ophelia, offering extreme death metal, is also on there, and is listed among Sinclair's 145 'friends', alongside the most famous dads' band of them all, the Rolling Stones. The Stones have four free tracks on their MySpace page, including 'Satisfaction', which has attracted 158,472 plays. 'I don't think Mick and Keith are actually on there every day,' Sinclair reasons, 'but they have someone very good doing it, and they are good at sweeping away any unofficial sites very quickly. I'm not sure if any record company will take any band seriously now unless they're on MySpace,' Sinclair says. 'The only person I've found who isn't on there is Chris Rea, and I think that's a mistake on his part.'
It is not clear what Murdoch intends to do with MySpace, apart from putting on some more big adverts, possibly for his other traditional media outlets, and then leaving well alone. For nothing will upset its free-thinking members quicker than a feeling they are being overseen by a multinational. Earlier this month, Billy Bragg withdrew his music from his MySpace page, claiming that a legal clause meant that News Corporation could claim royalties from his songs. Messages were being sent around MySpace titled 'Run! Save yourselves! Rupert Murdoch is after our content...' News Corporation denies such intentions, but last week displayed other plans: MySpace launched MySpace Careers, a link to the Simply Hired search engine that promises 5m job opportunities. A few weeks ago MySpace announced that in the US it will sell episodes of its (Murdoch-owned) Fox TV series for $1.99 per download. It is clearly impossible to own a site with many millions of members without trying to take money off them.
In one sense, MySpace is nothing new. More than 20 years ago members of the Well, a wired community around San Francisco, began posting their details and opinions on an online bulletin board. What is different now is the scale. Most Bebo and MySpace users would not consider themselves netheads, far less nerds. Beyond the music, MySpace still has a strong sense of community about it. Alongside all the drunken photos and misspellings there is an outpouring of much genuine creativity and emotion. As a teenager it can make you feel less alone. In January a member called Emma, who says she loves the sensation of walking on sand at night, posted an account of an incident involving her 19-year-old boyfriend Glen. One afternoon Glen had been involved in a fight, and was probably hit on the head by a beer can, but was well enough to go drinking with friends in the evening. He then collapsed, went to hospital, but texts assured his friends that he was OK. 'We were wrong,' Emma wrote on her MySpace blog. 'At 8.20 Saturday 14th morning i got a phone call from glens dad saying he was in intensive care... he is in a neck brace and on a breathing machine...'
Glen's condition worsened, and his friends shared their anguish and love on Emma's page. 'Glen is such a peaceful and non-violent guy, it truly is a tragedy,' wrote the Original D-A-N-O three days after Glen was hospitalised. 'Dont know the guy at all, but sad news,' Nicko The Sicko wrote a day afterwards (the names members chose when they first joined in a rush of bravado suddenly seemed out of place). A day later, Emma posted an update. 'His brain scans show improvement which obviously is gr8!' A week later there was a relapse. 'Last night at 8pm glen had to have another emergency operation,' Emma wrote. 'This time they removed part of glens brain to try and make room for the swelling. ' On 5 February she wrote: 'Ok so basically glen is going to pass away, the hemmorage has cause his brain to die. I am so sorry everyone. He has gone to be with his mum, he was never afraid of dying. i know every1 who has made an impact on glens life he will be looking after you.'
Then a remarkable thing happened. Not long after he died, Glen's MySpace friends began posting messages on his own homepage, which became a shrine. At the beginning of this week there were 124 messages, and they continue to appear. 'Hey man, saw you today in town, was so sure it was you ran straight up to the guy,' James wrote two weeks ago. 'Glen, just about to go into my last ever exam,' a friend called Sarah wrote last week. 'Have your teddy with me for luck...miss you so much...xxx' And two days after that, Emma wrote again. 'Glen i love you, i still think about you every second of the day.'
MySpace and its rivals are open to anyone who registers, but there are also many closed virtual communities, defined by a common interest or location, or a requirement to subscribe. What Bebo is to schools, Facebook is to universities, an online epidemic. It is a wonder anyone finds time to graduate these days, what with organising Facebook friends, loading photos and writing music and film lists. You have to have a college-linked email to enter it, and then you can 'poke' away to your heart's content. (As with all these sites, it is easy to make yourself irresistibly attractive online - but on Facebook to 'poke' someone is merely to contact them to say you've been checking their site.) Last Monday, for instance, the Facebook log called Pulse showed that at Oxford University 3,545 people had poked each other the previous day. Pulse also showed that favourite bands were the Killers, Coldplay and Radiohead, and favourite television was Family Guy, The Simpsons and The OC. One click compares these preferences with any other university, so we know that at Harvard, where Facebook began in February 2004 when a student called Mark Zuckerberg got restless waiting for the college staff to put the yearbook online, the top three are Family Guy, 24 and Grey's Anatomy
'It's become a surrogate social network,' Joe Taylor, a dPhil student at the Department of Physiology at Oxford told me. 'I don't think it's replacing social intervention, but it's extending the possibilities. Students used to make collective trips to the library, but Facebook means you can work in your own room and make it a more pleasurable experience. And then if you want to organise a trip to the pub, it's so easy.'
Taylor has 40 friends linked to his site but says that Facebook has developed a new, extremely loose interpretation of the word 'friend'. 'At any social occasion you're introduced to many people you will probably never see again. But if you can remember their name you can put them among your Facebook friends, and a huge, loose network develops. There appear to be many people whose sole aim in life at the moment is to acquire as many Facebook friends as possible.'
But social gregariousness has its drawbacks. Members embrace Facebook and its siblings as if it was something that will disappear when their student days are over, rather than something that may yet come back to haunt them. Employers, especially those in education or public service, may be particularly interested to learn about your past exploits.
Facebook is still being discovered by students, and there are a lot of universities in Britain yet to sign up. And when every college has, Facebook may be suddenly uncool, replaced by something smaller and more specialised, perhaps, and something not yet discovered by a City person working in mergers and acquisitions. Members of online social networking sites display the same preferences as people who meet in bars: they only want to be where the cool and pretty people are.
The common attributes of the new sites, apart from wild popularity, is their propensity for creativity and convergence. It's amazing what people can make these days in their bedrooms, and how each bedroom has decided to leave their curtains open. In addition to the music on MySpace, there is a boggling display of home-made videos on sites such as YouTube, Google Video and Grouper, and millions of photos on Flickr. This trend, which has become known as Web2.0, has dismantled the old artistic and business order in the same way that iTunes has shaken record buying, Amazon has changed bookselling, and eBay is killing car boot sales. Artists have become their own agents, musicians their own record labels, and video makers their own broadcasters. And everyone on Bebo and MySpace and Facebook has become their own publicist, shouting Me Me Me.
Why should we not believe Bebo's founder when he says this is only the beginning? Already the big social networking sites have their offshoots, and many look like winners. The ultimate social networking site may be Dogster, an online place where dogs can chat to each other through their owners, and exchange tips on grooming and flea control. This is a very commercial site, packed with adverts for dried food, but it is also an illuminating one. Hundreds of thousands of dogs have posted their pictures and diaries online, and they're just waiting for your approval.
Virtually unlimited
bebo.com
This network of 25m members provides a fascinating insight into teenagers, particularly for advertisers, and stirs up inter-school rivalry, with a catty yearbook tone. One school in Kent has banned it.
tagworld.com
You can customise your own portal, carry out highly specific narrow people searches based on postcodes, add animations to your photographs, buy and sell things and spy on people looking at your page.
platial.com
A map and blog mash-up on which you can contribute a 'neogeographical' representation of your life to expand the Platial world. Members provide meaningful maps, like the best places to kiss in London or skate in NYC, uploading photographs and video, and supplying notes on personal experiences.
gaydar.co.uk
The number one gay bar in cyberspace, with 1m UK subscribers and 3.5m worldwide. Gaydar has branched out to include a travel company and has created the'Gaydar Positioning Service' (GPS), so you can find likeminded people worldwide.
dontstayin.com
In the tradition of society pages, DSI is a photo gallery of party snaps. Budding photographers go to clubs, capture the mayhem and post the evidence online.
therememberingsite.org
This sees the lives of everyman and woman as worthy of historical documentation. One of many autobiography sites offering the amateur a space to publish memoirs or create a tribute for someone else. Sarah Phillips
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jun/18/digitalmedia.observerreview
It is a new internet revolution being joined by hundreds of thousands every day. Called 'Me Media', is has sparked an explosion of sites like Bebo and Facebook where users generate the content - creating their own space online. How did this phenomenon change the face of social interaction and help 'rock the world' of a generation. Simon Garfield reports
In the last few days a long-haired Englishman with a wife and two children received a number of unsolicited and erratically spelt love letters on his internet homepage. 'BEBO IS SOOOO ADDICTIVE! Bebo bebo bebo!!!' wrote Philip Lee, 16, from County Tyrone. 'Thnx 2u, I'm goin 2 fail my GCSE's.' 'Omigod thanks so much for bebo its sooo class!' wrote 14 year-old Danielle Enright. 'Bebo rocks!' said Sarah K, another teenager from Ireland.
The object of their affection is Michael Birch, 35, who founded Bebo with his wife Xochi in January 2005 after they had moved from London to California. In the last year 25 million people have joined it, most still at school. Like Yahoo and Google before it, Bebo is a word that has gone from meaningless to meaning everything to its users in a dramatically short period, and there are so many of them that soon the computerised world may have no one between 11 and 18 who is not a fanatic. Bebo is currently the sixth most popular site in the UK, bigger than AOL, Amazon and bbc.co.uk.
It is part of an internet phenomenon known as social networking, something which has replaced, or at least supplemented, real-life meeting up. In the real world, social networking often involves travelling, drinking, personal digital assistants and business cards, but the internet has simplified the process. Members of Bebo, most of whom learnt to use a computer as soon as the bars on their cots were dismantled, can do a lot of the usual internet things on their Bebo homepages like uploading music, videos and photos, and updating their blog, but for the first time they can do it all in one place. In the old days, teenagers would tie up the phone lines all night, or amass huge bills on their mobiles. MSN instant messaging - onlinewritten conversation - changed that, but words alone can get boring in a multimedia age. So imagine the possibilities if anyone of any age could create their own webpage for free, and include in it almost everything that turned them on; and imagine if they were instantly linked to everyone else. Bebo members can not only contact all their friends and all their friends' friends, but also all the friends of friends of friends. And in this way the internet is beginning to join itself up. If you had a couple of spare years you would still not run out of photos to click on and new friends to make. It is like a giant digital chain letter with no downside if you break it, beyond the feeling that maybe you should get out more.
But we don't get out more. Not long ago, most of us felt we were a part of the online community just by configuring our broadband connection, and we were happy to stare passively at screens. But now we are eager to claim part of it as our own, hence the adopted name for this trend: Me Media. And there is no social stigma attached.
Bebo is a relative upstart in the social networking community, but it certainly isn't the last. Inevitably, Bebo has friends: MySpace, Friendster, Classmates, Xanga, MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, hi5, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Sconex, CrushSpot, Multiply, Orkut, Tagworld, Tagged, Piczo, Mooble, WAYN, ASmallWorld, MyYearBook, Cyworld, ProfileHeaven, Fropper and EveryonesConnected.
Michael Birch's original internet plans were aimed at an older age group - thirtysomethings - but he soon learnt that social networking online depends on finding a focus based on more than age - a classroom, for instance, or a particular hobby. 'I wanted it to be a place where I could exchange photos and keep in touch with my family in England,' he said on Friday from his home in San Francisco. 'But you can't control who finds websites popular. Teenagers are always the early adopters online because they have more time on their hands and less money - and social networks are free.'
And so Bebo spread entirely by word of mouth in schools and colleges, to the point where his site now has 100 million page views every day. Bebo is just a refinement of Ringo, Birch's previous attempt at a social networking site that he built in 2003 and sold not long after it reached 400,000 members. And that grew out of BirthdayAlarm.com, a successful birthday reminder service using eCards that currently has 40m users. Birch bought the name Bebo from someone else. 'When we planned the site, all the cool, short names were taken,' he says. ' But after we bought it we invented an acronym for it: blog early blog often.'
It could be that Bebo and co have nothing much to do with social networking in the established sense. Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia University in New York, recently told the New Yorker that it had more to do with 'voyeurism and exhibitionism. People like to express themselves, and they are curious about other people.' That is to say, it's just a basic human instinct.
On a practical level, the real reason Bebo has taken off so fast is because it can be mastered by a 12-year-old. There is no tricky programming to learn, no software to load. You click on a template and receive instant gratification. Friendster was the first of the social networking sites to capitalise on the one-click advances in technology and experience the sort of rapid exponential growth that is crucial to success on the internet. But Friendster is no longer considered the hippest kid in the playground.
With Bebo, even someone slightly older than the target market will have no trouble joining up. I gave the registration site my first name, and before I could give my second I read: 'Safety Tip: If you are under the age of 21 in particular, we strongly recommend entering only the first letter of your last name.' Then it's your age and as much of your address as you want to supply, a username and password, and after that it's the fun stuff - personal descriptions, what makes you happy and scared, and simple uploads of anything already stored on your computer. At the end you're asked if you want to feature on the main Bebo homepage, which is where I found a 17-year-old student called Kirsty Mackay passing the time online with her friends in Aberdeen.
On her homepage, Mackay expresses a preference for R&B and 'chick flicks', and displays more than a hundred photos of herself on holiday and at parties. She told me she had joined four months ago after a friend had seen funny pictures of her on someone else's Bebo site. 'So I went to look, and I found out a lot of my friends had Bebo pages. I thought it was a good way of keeping in touch with friends I may have lost track with over the years without the cost of phoning or texting them.' She said she particularly liked the funny comments people left after looking at her pictures.
A few hours after messaging Mackay, I went to some friends for dinner. I told them what I was writing about, but they hadn't heard of Bebo. We went upstairs to the computer, and their 12-year-old daughter was on her own Bebo site, communicating with Bebo friends. Her music preferences were 'kelly clarkson!! also that song in titanic rocks! n black eyed peas some of it n sum girls aloud stuff n hilary duff and most of the songs in Grease.'
One of the wonders of Bebo is that so many people join as themselves, albeit a slightly more glamorous version. Kirsty Mackay thought Bebo seemed safe enough as 'it didn't have any of your personal details on it'. But in any large open network the risks of abuse are considerable. Anyone can pretend to be someone else. Many schools have written to parents warning of risks, suggesting they should limit the personal information disclosed, and report incidents of online bullying. 'The web may blur the line between exercises of imagination, fancy and wishful thinking on the one hand, and outright deception on the other,' Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn told me. 'Then there is the phenomenon of fiction becoming reality, as people contour themselves to the persona they have created, perhaps on the web. '
Birch believes we are only at the beginning of things. Social networking sites 'are becoming much more of a utility over time rather than being a pure gimmick', he told the website Online Personals Watch. 'They're actually providing a genuine benefit. For example, Bebo is a cultural phenomenon in Ireland. A Beboer contacted us from Ireland and told us that before Bebo, the folks in his small town were not getting along. Then everyone independently joined Bebo, and got to know each other and now there's a community spirit in the town pub that wasn't there before.' In other words, young people are exploiting the ideal way of communicating with each other: socially awkward and self-conscious in the real world, fluent in the online world.
Birch secured $15m in venture capital funding, an investment that will increase Bebo's visibility in the United States, where, compared to this country, it is a lightweight. In two weeks the money will help him launch Bebo Bands, an additional product that will enable members to share their own music online the way they currently do on MySpace. It has taken investors and the traditional media a while to catch up with online social networking, but they are now increasingly eager to take a slice of a hugely lucrative market. Last week YouthNoise, a network of young people interested in social change with only 120,000 members, raised $2.5m in funding; two weeks earlier Friendster raised an additional $3.1m. With one swoop, investors and purchasers acquire what media people like to call 'a cultural on-ramp', an entree into an expressive and affluent young world, a world traditionally suspicious of voyeurs and multinational conglomerates. As with established media, the money to be made comes from advertising. On Bebo there are no adverts on a user's homepage but as soon as you click on the photos or your mail there are enticing links to Sony and Nokia.
Bebo remains privately owned. Not so MySpace, which last year was bought, along with its parent company, by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580m. At the moment this looks like the bargain of the century. In April, Nielsen NetRatings recorded 38.4m unique visitors to MySpace, up from 8.2m only a year before. There are more than 80m members.
MySpace made headlines in Britain a few weeks ago when Sandi Thom, a Scottish singer, had a No 1 single with 'I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair)'. Her success was a triumph of how to advertise to young people without making them feel they're being sold anything. 'Viral marketing' is the digital version of word-of-mouth. The Arctic Monkeys also established themselves on MySpace. Thom was not an unsigned singer when she broadcast via her MySpace site from a basement in south London but created one of those strange social phenomena in which tens of thousands of people believe simultaneously that they are the first and only ones to discover something new and 'real'. In fact, EMI had sent hundreds of thousands of email flyers in advance of the webcast, alerting a potential market.
But MySpace is far more than an advertising billboard; or, rather, it is an advertising billboard for everyone. A search for bands beginning with S will throw up Same Time Tomorrow (rock/emo/pop), SRT (punk/rock/Christian rap) and David Sinclair (rock/blues), the latter a three-piece unit led by the experienced music writer for the Times, the Independent and the Word. Sinclair is 53, and was happy to find that MySpace was not just for people with acne. He joined last September, and his songs have since attracted more than 1,300 plays. He has also found that numbers at his live shows have swelled with MySpace members. 'The community of dads' bands is normally quite hidden, but on MySpace there are hundreds of thousands of them,' Sinclair told me. His 16-year-old son's band, Ophelia, offering extreme death metal, is also on there, and is listed among Sinclair's 145 'friends', alongside the most famous dads' band of them all, the Rolling Stones. The Stones have four free tracks on their MySpace page, including 'Satisfaction', which has attracted 158,472 plays. 'I don't think Mick and Keith are actually on there every day,' Sinclair reasons, 'but they have someone very good doing it, and they are good at sweeping away any unofficial sites very quickly. I'm not sure if any record company will take any band seriously now unless they're on MySpace,' Sinclair says. 'The only person I've found who isn't on there is Chris Rea, and I think that's a mistake on his part.'
It is not clear what Murdoch intends to do with MySpace, apart from putting on some more big adverts, possibly for his other traditional media outlets, and then leaving well alone. For nothing will upset its free-thinking members quicker than a feeling they are being overseen by a multinational. Earlier this month, Billy Bragg withdrew his music from his MySpace page, claiming that a legal clause meant that News Corporation could claim royalties from his songs. Messages were being sent around MySpace titled 'Run! Save yourselves! Rupert Murdoch is after our content...' News Corporation denies such intentions, but last week displayed other plans: MySpace launched MySpace Careers, a link to the Simply Hired search engine that promises 5m job opportunities. A few weeks ago MySpace announced that in the US it will sell episodes of its (Murdoch-owned) Fox TV series for $1.99 per download. It is clearly impossible to own a site with many millions of members without trying to take money off them.
In one sense, MySpace is nothing new. More than 20 years ago members of the Well, a wired community around San Francisco, began posting their details and opinions on an online bulletin board. What is different now is the scale. Most Bebo and MySpace users would not consider themselves netheads, far less nerds. Beyond the music, MySpace still has a strong sense of community about it. Alongside all the drunken photos and misspellings there is an outpouring of much genuine creativity and emotion. As a teenager it can make you feel less alone. In January a member called Emma, who says she loves the sensation of walking on sand at night, posted an account of an incident involving her 19-year-old boyfriend Glen. One afternoon Glen had been involved in a fight, and was probably hit on the head by a beer can, but was well enough to go drinking with friends in the evening. He then collapsed, went to hospital, but texts assured his friends that he was OK. 'We were wrong,' Emma wrote on her MySpace blog. 'At 8.20 Saturday 14th morning i got a phone call from glens dad saying he was in intensive care... he is in a neck brace and on a breathing machine...'
Glen's condition worsened, and his friends shared their anguish and love on Emma's page. 'Glen is such a peaceful and non-violent guy, it truly is a tragedy,' wrote the Original D-A-N-O three days after Glen was hospitalised. 'Dont know the guy at all, but sad news,' Nicko The Sicko wrote a day afterwards (the names members chose when they first joined in a rush of bravado suddenly seemed out of place). A day later, Emma posted an update. 'His brain scans show improvement which obviously is gr8!' A week later there was a relapse. 'Last night at 8pm glen had to have another emergency operation,' Emma wrote. 'This time they removed part of glens brain to try and make room for the swelling. ' On 5 February she wrote: 'Ok so basically glen is going to pass away, the hemmorage has cause his brain to die. I am so sorry everyone. He has gone to be with his mum, he was never afraid of dying. i know every1 who has made an impact on glens life he will be looking after you.'
Then a remarkable thing happened. Not long after he died, Glen's MySpace friends began posting messages on his own homepage, which became a shrine. At the beginning of this week there were 124 messages, and they continue to appear. 'Hey man, saw you today in town, was so sure it was you ran straight up to the guy,' James wrote two weeks ago. 'Glen, just about to go into my last ever exam,' a friend called Sarah wrote last week. 'Have your teddy with me for luck...miss you so much...xxx' And two days after that, Emma wrote again. 'Glen i love you, i still think about you every second of the day.'
MySpace and its rivals are open to anyone who registers, but there are also many closed virtual communities, defined by a common interest or location, or a requirement to subscribe. What Bebo is to schools, Facebook is to universities, an online epidemic. It is a wonder anyone finds time to graduate these days, what with organising Facebook friends, loading photos and writing music and film lists. You have to have a college-linked email to enter it, and then you can 'poke' away to your heart's content. (As with all these sites, it is easy to make yourself irresistibly attractive online - but on Facebook to 'poke' someone is merely to contact them to say you've been checking their site.) Last Monday, for instance, the Facebook log called Pulse showed that at Oxford University 3,545 people had poked each other the previous day. Pulse also showed that favourite bands were the Killers, Coldplay and Radiohead, and favourite television was Family Guy, The Simpsons and The OC. One click compares these preferences with any other university, so we know that at Harvard, where Facebook began in February 2004 when a student called Mark Zuckerberg got restless waiting for the college staff to put the yearbook online, the top three are Family Guy, 24 and Grey's Anatomy
'It's become a surrogate social network,' Joe Taylor, a dPhil student at the Department of Physiology at Oxford told me. 'I don't think it's replacing social intervention, but it's extending the possibilities. Students used to make collective trips to the library, but Facebook means you can work in your own room and make it a more pleasurable experience. And then if you want to organise a trip to the pub, it's so easy.'
Taylor has 40 friends linked to his site but says that Facebook has developed a new, extremely loose interpretation of the word 'friend'. 'At any social occasion you're introduced to many people you will probably never see again. But if you can remember their name you can put them among your Facebook friends, and a huge, loose network develops. There appear to be many people whose sole aim in life at the moment is to acquire as many Facebook friends as possible.'
But social gregariousness has its drawbacks. Members embrace Facebook and its siblings as if it was something that will disappear when their student days are over, rather than something that may yet come back to haunt them. Employers, especially those in education or public service, may be particularly interested to learn about your past exploits.
Facebook is still being discovered by students, and there are a lot of universities in Britain yet to sign up. And when every college has, Facebook may be suddenly uncool, replaced by something smaller and more specialised, perhaps, and something not yet discovered by a City person working in mergers and acquisitions. Members of online social networking sites display the same preferences as people who meet in bars: they only want to be where the cool and pretty people are.
The common attributes of the new sites, apart from wild popularity, is their propensity for creativity and convergence. It's amazing what people can make these days in their bedrooms, and how each bedroom has decided to leave their curtains open. In addition to the music on MySpace, there is a boggling display of home-made videos on sites such as YouTube, Google Video and Grouper, and millions of photos on Flickr. This trend, which has become known as Web2.0, has dismantled the old artistic and business order in the same way that iTunes has shaken record buying, Amazon has changed bookselling, and eBay is killing car boot sales. Artists have become their own agents, musicians their own record labels, and video makers their own broadcasters. And everyone on Bebo and MySpace and Facebook has become their own publicist, shouting Me Me Me.
Why should we not believe Bebo's founder when he says this is only the beginning? Already the big social networking sites have their offshoots, and many look like winners. The ultimate social networking site may be Dogster, an online place where dogs can chat to each other through their owners, and exchange tips on grooming and flea control. This is a very commercial site, packed with adverts for dried food, but it is also an illuminating one. Hundreds of thousands of dogs have posted their pictures and diaries online, and they're just waiting for your approval.
Virtually unlimited
bebo.com
This network of 25m members provides a fascinating insight into teenagers, particularly for advertisers, and stirs up inter-school rivalry, with a catty yearbook tone. One school in Kent has banned it.
tagworld.com
You can customise your own portal, carry out highly specific narrow people searches based on postcodes, add animations to your photographs, buy and sell things and spy on people looking at your page.
platial.com
A map and blog mash-up on which you can contribute a 'neogeographical' representation of your life to expand the Platial world. Members provide meaningful maps, like the best places to kiss in London or skate in NYC, uploading photographs and video, and supplying notes on personal experiences.
gaydar.co.uk
The number one gay bar in cyberspace, with 1m UK subscribers and 3.5m worldwide. Gaydar has branched out to include a travel company and has created the'Gaydar Positioning Service' (GPS), so you can find likeminded people worldwide.
dontstayin.com
In the tradition of society pages, DSI is a photo gallery of party snaps. Budding photographers go to clubs, capture the mayhem and post the evidence online.
therememberingsite.org
This sees the lives of everyman and woman as worthy of historical documentation. One of many autobiography sites offering the amateur a space to publish memoirs or create a tribute for someone else. Sarah Phillips
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jun/18/digitalmedia.observerreview
Report: Buying a PC for the Applied Psychology Course
Report: Buying a PC for the Applied Psychology Course
When buying a PC for a course in Applied Psychology, the student should consider a number of factors in order to choose a PC that will meet all of the specific needs required for this particular degree.
Storage: Lecture notes, power point presentations and essays will all need to be stored on the PC. These files usually take up a relatively small amount of storage space; however, for subjects such as multimedia design and ICT, photos, design projects and other large files will need to be stored. Therefore a PC with a hard drive of a minimum of 300GB (gigabytes) and a memory, or RAM (Random Access Memory), of at least 2GB should be necessary. A large RAM will also serve to help speed up the performance of your PC.
Processing Speed: How fast your PC performs is a very important factor when choosing your PC. PCs with “dual-core” or “triple-core” chips are quicker than single core chips as they have two or three processors on them, instead of just one. Generally, the more cores the better, especially for multitasking.
As a student, a laptop is probably more functional than a desktop as it allows you to travel with it. In this case, battery life and the physical size of your machine are also important factors to consider. Depending on how much travel you do, the size of your laptop can vary accordingly. The smallest laptops can begin at two pounds, ranging upwards to fifteen pounds. If choosing a smaller laptop you may have to sacrifice certain features such as storage and screen size. The cost of smaller laptops can also be higher. However, the need to travel regularly with it may make these factors less important to you.
Most laptops now include Wi-Fi, and this is a very important feature of any students’ pc. Wi-Fi allows you to access the internet wirelessly, in a variety of locations, from home and college, to train stations, cafes and more.
Overall, in order to effectively choose a PC, a student must decide what the main functions of the PC will be for them, and weigh up the most important factors, whether it is cost, storage, size or style, and this will vary from student to student. Luckily though, as there is such a variety in PCs today, once you have identified your needs, finding a computer to match them shouldn’t be a problem.
When buying a PC for a course in Applied Psychology, the student should consider a number of factors in order to choose a PC that will meet all of the specific needs required for this particular degree.
Storage: Lecture notes, power point presentations and essays will all need to be stored on the PC. These files usually take up a relatively small amount of storage space; however, for subjects such as multimedia design and ICT, photos, design projects and other large files will need to be stored. Therefore a PC with a hard drive of a minimum of 300GB (gigabytes) and a memory, or RAM (Random Access Memory), of at least 2GB should be necessary. A large RAM will also serve to help speed up the performance of your PC.
Processing Speed: How fast your PC performs is a very important factor when choosing your PC. PCs with “dual-core” or “triple-core” chips are quicker than single core chips as they have two or three processors on them, instead of just one. Generally, the more cores the better, especially for multitasking.
As a student, a laptop is probably more functional than a desktop as it allows you to travel with it. In this case, battery life and the physical size of your machine are also important factors to consider. Depending on how much travel you do, the size of your laptop can vary accordingly. The smallest laptops can begin at two pounds, ranging upwards to fifteen pounds. If choosing a smaller laptop you may have to sacrifice certain features such as storage and screen size. The cost of smaller laptops can also be higher. However, the need to travel regularly with it may make these factors less important to you.
Most laptops now include Wi-Fi, and this is a very important feature of any students’ pc. Wi-Fi allows you to access the internet wirelessly, in a variety of locations, from home and college, to train stations, cafes and more.
Overall, in order to effectively choose a PC, a student must decide what the main functions of the PC will be for them, and weigh up the most important factors, whether it is cost, storage, size or style, and this will vary from student to student. Luckily though, as there is such a variety in PCs today, once you have identified your needs, finding a computer to match them shouldn’t be a problem.
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