No I have not fallen of the face of the earth. It’s just been a little busy of late. Hence no blogging for the last few weeks, sorry about that, but these things do happen from time to time. It’s never been about lack of topics, more the lack of time.
Mind you during this time I have been able to reflect on various things. One of which is the future direction of online social networking.
Don’t know if you have noticed but the web is becoming obsessed with video. First off we had YouTube and the like with the publication of amateur video and the associated commenting.
Now the web has moved on from all that to conversational video. So has video killed the forum, the IRC, the blog. The interesting point for users in Australia is the low bandwidth of the broadband services can make the use of these services is all but impossible in some places. Still there are some interesting services now available:
Silly season is here: Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test, Andy Clarke wants the W3C CSS working group to rethink, Forbes releases the 25 top Web Celebrities for 2008. Yeap you can tell things are a little crazy, must be something in the air in relation to the season this time of year. Okay some of these items have a very serious side (IE8 and the CSS working group). But it is a little amazing how all these important issues and others tend to launch themselves at us just as we are preparing for a much earned break with family and friends.
Get the impression these days that we may have just overstep the mark with the number of social networking sites that are appearing. Now I’m not going out looking for them, but it just seems that they are appearing at the rate of about 2-3 a day at the moment.
Who has time to check them out, setup the account, workout if it’s worth investing time in importing your social network into site by the old hunt and gather the names method; I would never trust them to go collect the information for me. I usually bookmark them and move on. So every now and again (maybe 1 in 20) I will signup.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
