james mckay dot net

It seems that scarcely a week goes by these days without someone launching Yet Another Social Networking Site. There are more of them knocking around these days than you can shake a stick at: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, Bebo, Jaiku, Wayn, Twitter, Second Life, LiveJournal, meetup.com … the list goes on.

Pownce is one of the latest newcomers, and I got an invite for it just before Faith Camp. It was founded by various Web 2.0 entrepreneurs including Kevin Rose of Digg fame and launched about a month or so ago with great fanfare. Its purpose, as it says on the home page, is to “send stuff to your friends”:

Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.

Right. So what exactly does it do that you can’t already do with a combination of MSN Messenger and either Facebook or MySpace?

It seems that your home page on Pownce shows the latest things that you and all your friends have posted on the site, so to make the most of it you need to have a network of friends who are using it. Visually, it looks pretty slick, and the concept seems similar in some ways to Twitter, but it still seems a bit pointless to me.

Social networking sites can absorb a lot of your time if you let them. You can spend hours on Facebook alone, and with a plethora of new ones on the scene it can be hard to keep track of all of them. However, most of my friends only make regular use of the biggest, best known and most useful ones: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, and maybe one or two others.

I wonder a bit if Web 2.0 is reaching saturation point somewhat. Or is it just another sign of the times we live in, where just as society re-invents itself every fortnight, the latest and greatest Internet phenomenon is a constantly and rapidly moving target?

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Posted at 14:08 on 8 August 2007.
Tagged: hype, Pownce, social networking, Web 2.0

So I finally succumbed to pressure from my friends and colleagues and got myself onto Facebook. This may come as a bit of a surprise given my rather low opinion of MySpace, but then again, while there are similarities, Facebook is not MySpace.

What is the difference? Two things. One is aesthetics. There are none of these awful seizure-inducing profile pages with illegibly tiny pink text on an orange background, and no annoying background music, and in their place is a slick, clean, responsive, easy to use Ajax driven interface.

The second — and much more important — thing: developers, developers, developers. MySpace has hitherto had something of a reputation for sending in the legal heavies after people who write widgets and add-ons for the platform. Facebook is the exact opposite, and positively encourages it, having released a complete API with full instructions on how to make a Facebook application.

This makes it the Swiss Army Knife of social networking websites, since there is so much that you can do with the platform. You can integrate Facebook with a whole lot of other services such as your own WordPress blog (my own blog posts get reproduced on my Facebook profile via the RSS feed) or even Wikipedia if you are that way inclined. A particularly useful application that has recently been launched is Google Reader Shared Items, which allows you to share interesting items in your RSS feeds with your friends very easily. Scoble loves it.

I think sites such as Facebook are also well placed to supplant e-mail as the primary one-to-one communication means of the Internet. Because you set up a network of friends, there is an element of trust there that makes it much easier to filter out spam, phishing and viruses. Of course, these nefarious characters tend to be a pretty crafty bunch, so vigilance is still necessary, but since there is an identifiable element of trust there, it is easier to filter it out or even block it altogether, by setting your profile so that only people you have accepted as friends can contact you through the system.

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Posted at 23:22 on 16 July 2007.
Tagged: Facebook, MySpace, social networking