Status epilepticus: the 50 funniest instant messenger statuses

In 2001-2003, back when instant messaging was young and social networking was something we did in bars, I was working at Yahoo! and had a lot of fun trying to write wittier status messages for Yahoo! Messenger than the 500-odd other employees (see, this is why the company is now in the toilet. Too much time being clever in Yahoo! Messenger.)

I was cleaning out some cruft on my web host today and came across a forgotten list of some of the best IM status messages I'd seen while working at Yahoo!. Some of them may be too 'insider' (e.g. "Venkat" was senior engineering manager at Yahoo! and it was always a battle to get some engineering resources from his team) but many of them have universal appeal. Where known, I've credited their author by their Yahoo! Messenger ID. Many of those people still go by the same IDs, so if you're interested, try googling them (oops, I mean "yahooing" them.)

However I think I speak for all the original authors when I say: please go ahead and use any of these you wish. Enjoy!

Computing

• 10,000 Leagues Under The C++



• Now featuring multi-redundant links!



• Wireless and clueless



• All your engineers are belong to Venkat



• Disk space, the final frontier



• Do, or Ctrl-Z, there is no 'try'



• Home is where the base href is



• There's no page like home



• About to be replaced by a shell script



• On the internet, noone knows I'm a parent

Culture

• Living la vida Yoda



• Is anybody out there?



• On Messenger, nobody can hear you scream



• The less i know the more i appear to understand



• Phasers set to stun



• Savaging the soothed beast



• Filmed in Cinemascope



• Communication creates the illusion of progress



• Not at your desk



• But more, much more than this, you'll do it my way!



• I am a work of speculative fiction



• Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young



• Conan the Humanitarian (naikrovek, 2002)



• Let the Wookie win (naikrovek, 2002)



• Stigmata - high-five gone awry (karen jackson 2002)



• Winona, if you don't steal, i'll go out with you (naikrovek, 2002)



• Only the young die young



• It hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year



• My PDA says it's your birthday, but it cares more than I do

• When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is nails, it's Hammer Time.

Advertising

• Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commision

Holidays

• Pull apart my buns and smear them with butter (Easter)

I Hate Work

• Capitalisation is in the eye of the shareholder



• What if the Hokey-Pokey IS what it's all about? (Stephanie Snyder, 2001)



• Camel, eye of needle... grease...



• 99% of the game is half mental



• All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power



• Like a snowball gathering steam (the_bigtee 2003)



• Busier than a leper in an all-hands meeting (goonker 2003)

If you're brave enough to give a little, you get a little back

It's important to consider the privacy of others - particularly children - when posting photos to the interweb.

Early in the history of Flickr I got a little freaked out when a friend's photos of her kid were snagged by an unknown woman who built a scary blog using the photos and her own stories to make like the kids were hers and not my friend's. Scary stalker stuff.

A while later, a naked photo of my son on Flickr received some unwelcome attention. Ick. But the sensible solution was not to post naked pictures of my kid - or anyone else's. Problem solved.

You'd think anyone managing a young sports star these days would either ban or closely moderate their entire participation in online social networking, but this week we saw controversial photos from members of the Australian Olympic swim team that had been snagged from their Facebook profile. Can't blame the journalists: need a photo to accompany a story, the choices are (a) pay $10,000 to a paparazzi and wait 24hrs to receive it, or (b) look up their Facebook profile and snag the photos they've added, free of charge? No brainer.

I could have over-reacted to the Flickr experience and never posted another photo of my son to the interweb, but then my gypsy family would never get to see their cousin/nephew/grandson at all. I could password-protected everything, but then family would never remember the password and never get around to asking me for it.

If I'd done either, I never would have seen this cool line art done by someone on Flickr, based on a photo I'd taken of my son:

Which was based on this photo of him grooving on his iPod while we were camping last year:

On the interweb, I think it's worth giving a little in order to get something back, and this is a great example.

For that reason, I make my photos on Flickr available on a Creative Commons "attribution-non-commercial" licence, meaning you can use them for anything non-commercial as long as you attribute them to me with a link. I'd be stoked if anyone else created good art out of something I just opened a shutter on for a fraction of a second.

What does it cost to get a social network user to churn?

Saucy social networking social networker Laurel Papworth has cleverly pointed out that AOL's announced acquisition of Bebo may jeopardise Yahoo7's big partnership deal with Bebo in Australia, since AOL Australia and Yahoo7 are competitors locally.

It'll take a while for the deal to go through and international partnership deals to be rejigged, perhaps as much as a year or so for them to get around to figuring out what to do with a market as small as Australia, but it would be reasonable to expect that AOL Australia would want the Yahoo7/Bebo deal to be unwoven asap.

Laurel says the Bebo deal represents as much as half Yahoo7's available ad inventory. Holy CPM, Batman! No idea if that's correct, but that's a big kick in the guts to lose that many eyeballs with only 6-12mths warning.

Before I pick my jaw up off the floor, there's something else that leaves me agape. I haven't reported on the deal yet because I've been waiting for the perspective to be able to see the deal from AOL's valuation side of things. Surely it would make sense if I gave it time. But nope. No sense yet.

So, what's with AOL offering $850 million, in cash? Is it all upfront? Or are there performance metrics Bebo needs to make to collect most of it? Did anyone tell AOL this business was started by a couple of people only three years ago? Did anyone point out that since most of AOL's customers are in the US, they don't want a Bebo account because they're either wedded to Facebook or MySpace already?

Speaking of which, where are the studies looking at the cost of getting someone to churn from one social network to another? Has anyone looked at that yet? If I've been focused on my Facebook account for one, six or 12 months, what's it going to cost a competitor to get me to switch to their product?

Personally, I'm all over Facebook, a bit active on MySpace, and on Bebo, I'm an "unengaged user" - i have an account there, but only to see how it works and browse through the kinds of users to be found there. So Facebook has me as an "engaged user" - using it several times a day, with almost all my real-world friends connected, and a big social history stored there. This animated blackboard toy is the only thing I really like about Bebo right now.

I don't have any numbers, but intuitively, I think there are two kinds of social network user: engaged minority and non-engaged majority. The non-engaged majority will churn quite easily, but because their engagement is low, they're not worth very much to you and will churn again to your next new competitor. The engaged user is, I'm guessing, extremely hard to dislodge, even if you give them the means to migrate all their content, social history and reputation to your new social network.

Yet the network effects that give a social network its value depend entirely on those highly-engaged users. In other words, if you succeed only in acquiring another network's unengaged users, you've failed. They won't stick because they don't care about documenting their social history, and they won't stick because you don't have the engaged users you need to keep the unengaged connected.

That's my guess, anyway: would love to see the numbers if you have them.

FriendFeedFeed is just a spoof

FriendFeedFeed
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Just a spoof, yes, but this is a trend worth spoofing. What worries me is these aggregations are headed in the wrong direction, losing richness, interconnections and annotations along the way: see my prior post on this topic.

I hate it when Facebook makes me remember someone's birthday. It's as heartfelt as all standing around a cake in the office singing happy birthday.

File under "you really had to be there": Dungeons & Dragons lives on

file under "you really had to be there": GG is dead, long live GG
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I'm not going to burden the interwebs with yet another personal reflection on the importance of Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons (a) because my own teenage years were so very like every other young geek; and (b) I knew someone would do it better.

Turns out Adam Rogers from WIRED magazine is that very someone, with not only the killer story, but a hilarious and partly true flowchart to back it up.

He asserts we're all still playing D&D - or at least, role-playing - when we're online, not just in Second Life and World of Warcraft, but also on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and Flickr.

I think that's an extraordinarily insightful premise. But I think it's your turn to roll...

trouble at the ranger station

ranger station banner
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

It took me less time to build a community site for an under 7 soccer team (inc. this nifty banner art) using Ning than it took 3eep.com.au to send me the confirmation email with the link i had to click on before i could start creating a site. 

So my son's soccer team is now on Ning, not 3eep. Much as I like Nick and Rob and the 3eep guys, it's a case of sorry 3eep, not quick enough this time around.

Death of social networks? Not that way, and not yet!

Mark Jones of Filtered Media is predicting the death of social networking. I don't think death is coming any time soon, and certainly not from Google and Gmail as Mark suggests. I think the bigger future threat for MySpace and Facebook are microblogging and social messaging layers over the top of the social networks.

Yes, social networks can't sustain the current growth. There will be a plateau. Following the plateau will come more realistic valuations, rationalisation and acquisition by the networks.

Yes, to some extent social networks will atomise - social networking platforms are already starting to blend in the features of other web platforms via their APIs and developer platforms, and it makes sense that some of that platform functionality will bleed out into email, search, blogging and other web platforms over time.

The 'friend spam' we see now on Facebook is a function of the immaturity of the social network businesses themselves, which are still learning how to manage open platforms, and to some extent a learning process for users - it's already unfashionable to be the friend who sends too much social network spam - soon, it will be social suicide.

I can't see Mark's 'Email 3.0' spelling the end of social networks. If I were an 18-25 year old, why would I need to wrangle with Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail if I can use Facebook's email to stay in touch with everyone I know? Hotmail spam vs Facebook spam? Give me the latter any day.

Why would I need to search from the Google homepage if Facebook was my homepage and I could launch a Google search from a Facebook app in my profile page?

Google's become the default for us 30-40 year olds, and Yahoo! is the default for our parents, but Facebook and MySpace have an opportunity to be the default starting point for our kids. ...if they seize the opportunity and execute well, which so far they have had trouble with.

Email is inherently a functional product - I need to have something to communicate to someone before I send an email. However social networks work best when I can use them as inspiration for finding something to say to my friends. I may not have any news myself today, but by browsing what my friends have been up to recently, there's always something that I can comment on, criticise, debate or LOL at.

Social networks will remain a place that people go to 'hang out' with their friends and meet new friends online. There will be fewer of them in the future, and the big ones will probably be owned by larger networks as MySpace is now.

But just as social networks have an opportunity to steal the email, search, media sharing and buying/searching eyeballs from the incumbents, there is already a couple of threats to the social networks: social messaging businesses like bluepulse (who are more comfortable if I disclose that I'm contracting for them any time I mention their name online, bless 'em!) and microblogging services like Twitter.

Social messaging businesses threaten social networks because they may steal away the user's all-important 'status message'. Without the status message being updated there's half the value of the Facebook newsfeed gone, and the newsfeed is everything to Facebook's business. If I can more quickly and easily update what I'm doing now from my mobile phone on bluepulse than I can on Facebook, then sure, Facebook may lose me (that's "me the hypothetical 20 year old" not "me the 43 year old".) Facebook's mobile product is still lame: you can't sign up as a Facebook user from a phone, and many of the key features are missing from the mobile product. Using MySpace's mobile product is like travelling back in time to 2000 and back in space to Boondocks, Carolina. I don't see any sign that Facebook or MySpace 'get' the importance of building a better mobile product yet.

Microblogging services like Twitter can also steal away the status message traffic and user loyalty from the social networks, by making it all about status messages, and then using the social network's own APIs to let the user update multiple social networks from one spot, saving time and money, both very precious to 18-25 year olds.

What's more important in a social messenger?

If you have a second, would be great if you could tell me which features are most important in your social messenger (bluepulse, twitter, pownce, jaiku, mig33, etc.) Go ahead and choose as many as you like, and please comment on the post if you'd like to say more about your choices or tell me what's missing from the list. Thanks!

What's more important feature in a social messenger?
	All my friends are on there already
	Works great on my mobile phone
	Quick to update my status
	Publishes RSS feed of my stuff
	Good privacy and spam controls
pollcode.com free polls

(This is part of Shai Coggin's 52 Weeks of Blogging Community project.) 

When worlds collide

When worlds collide
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I just used Twixtr to update Twitter and Facebook. But I also have Twitter set to update Facebook. So then Twitter also updates Facebook - ick.

Thank Jebus Facebook doesn't then update Twitter. Then Twitter would update Facebook, then... aaahhh! Infinite status update loop!

M/20 seeks F/12 for bad time

Uh-oh, i think this may be the first reported case of a sex crime arising from use of a mobile social network product, in this case mocospace:

"A 20-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly having sexual contact with a 12-year-old girl, officials said..." from CBS4 Denver.

It's not good for Mocospace and not good for the mobile social network industry in general for this to happen. But it's somewhat inevitable when even a casual browse on Mocospace makes it pretty clear that the popular female users on the network are not popular for their writing skills.

Say goodbye to the value of your social graph

Google's released a new API that allows developers to harvest the 'social graph' - the relationships between people on the web - the links labelled 'friend', 'colleague', 'mother', between our individual online identities.

At the moment, there is no single social graph for the interweb. Instead, separate proprietary graphs exist on each of the major portals (Yahoo!, etc) and also on the major social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, etc.). To a large extent, the value of these companies is tied up with the size of users graphed, the number of connections in those graphs, and the rate of growth in users and connections.

Because of the risks vs benefits involved, it seems unlikely that Google will be able to persuade players with high-value social graphs to open their data to the API very soon. Any player with a high-value social network risks contributing more value to its competitors than it receives by opening to the API. Google might be able to gain enough leverage to bring a majority in eventually.

If the industry adopts an open API for social graphing then it must also offer better tools to allow users to explicitly control what relationships are exposed, to whom, and to what level of detail. While the social graphs remain closed and proprietary the cost of unplanned exposure is still pretty low (though I continue to have a problem with the way LinkedIn exposes which other profiles have been viewed by the people who've been looking at my profile.) But if we move towards one shared social graph, it's going to be essential that you own and control it.

But the bigger problem for me is Google's habit of taking something of value (online storage, premium web-based email, calendaring, office suites and now social graphs) and making it free. Google can afford to do that while all its free services are supported and more by search ad revenue. But it really hurts the other companies in the same space. And one day, someone newer, faster and smarter will slip the search biz out from under Google the way it was slipped out from under Yahoo!. 

This is not about me.

A new post from Nic Hodges helped coalesce some of my recent thinking about social messaging and social networks. Nic talks about how two-way, conversational media is now becoming as involving and entertaining as, say, '60 Minutes'. And a lot more entertaining than 'Girls of the Playboy Mansion.' No, really.

Why is this so? How can smileys out-engage boobies?

The simple answer is that rediscovering that real people’s real lives can be entertaining, informative and engaging too.

But the complex-erer answer that I don't yet have any evidence beyond a strong gut feel is that documenting the events in your life - and how that changes you - is an activity that doesn’t only gain you an audience, it also helps you define and refine who you have been, are currently, and are becoming.

Defining who you were/are/will be is as compelling as it gets.


Girls of the Playboy Mansion: come on, seriously, you can't tell me this is entertainment...

Your identity isn’t just who you are now. It’s a vector, or a series of curves perhaps. It starts in the past, charting your passage through the events and ideas you’ve experienced and your reaction to those events and ideas.

That vector passes through the present, and that’s what we see of someone and usually think of identity. But the present is only the thinnest possible cross-section of your identity and in isolation gives only the slightest suggestion of who you will become as you continue on into the future.

I think social messaging and social networking is so fundamentally engaging because it gives us an opportunity to capture key moments of our identity as we move forward in time, leaving a documented history behind us, interwoven with the events, ideas, and people we’ve been introduced to along the way, and leaving evidence of how we’ve been influenced by them.

My prediction: browsing real people’s lives and documenting our own for others to browse will be the new entertainment hit for the 2020s. Partly because network television quality can sink no lower, partly because social messaging and social networking is just plain fun.

But mostly because, way down deep inside, we're learning about ourselves. 

And nobody's more interesting than me. Or you. Unless you happen to be me.

Is linkedin.com doing the right thing?

Is linkedin.com doing the right thing?
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I only have to say "Facebook Beacon" and you remember that it's good practice to allow your users to opt-in before disclosing any new personal information to other users or visitors, right?

So why has LinkedIn sprouted this new module that displays other profiles viewed by people who've viewed my profile? It's not OK by me, not OK by the viewers, and probably not OK by the other people whose profiles are listed here.

I didn't opt-in to displaying this information, and what's worse, I can't find anywhere I can disable this module in my LinkedIn account settings.

Bad form, and sub-par, LinkedIn!

The wrong way up a one way street of content

There are now so many microblogging platforms out there, and they're all so new none has quite achieved ubiquity yet. So teh kiddies at hellotxt have decided the right thing to do is to add anothr layer of aggregation on the interweb, this time to let you update all your microblog feeds from the one microblogger.

So gay! Why? Mostly bcoz they'll never keep up. New microblog apps appear quicker than anyone can blog about them, much less try them out.

But also because I'm starting to realise that all this blogging (and microblogging on top of that and microblog-aggregation on top of that) is taking the user in the wrong direction. Well, maybe not the generic user, but definitely me.

I'm being asked in the name of aggregation and convenience to step away from rich content and navigation and adopt command-line txt as my default mode of communication. I'm also being asked to divide and subdivide my total potential audience into smaller chunks based on how they want to receive me, with so much overlap between them it's usually possible to spam my true meatspace friends with my every thought.

This is what I get now. 

I get to push my thoughts through an ever-narrowing set of command line options defined by the subset of content types that will pass all the way from microblog aggregator at the top down to flexible, rich media publishing platform at the bottom. If I got carried away with the aggregation model, the blog you're reading now could become merely an RSS feed of my Facebook News Feed of my Twitter tweets from my Hellotxt login.

That's just wrong. AFU. All my bases are belong to telco and jabber.org.

This is what I want.

Why do I want to flip the model?

For starters, I want to publish the richest possible content to the widest possible audience first. Blogger's my most flexible, creative publishing platform. OK, to bang out a post that includes much rich content I have to go to the immensely tedious trouble of logging in via a browser or blogging client, but I'm old enough to remember desktop publishing, and if you imagine that old standby of print publishing Quark Xpress to be like a four-hour full cavity search in a Kazakh checkpoint that's just run out of lube, then Blogger's browser interface seems like a standup quickie with a supermodel in comparison.

My Facebook and Myspace and Bebo and even Twitter presences are discoverable, but with nothing like the discoverability and search-crawler friendlyness of my long-established blog. Most of my blog readers have never read my stuff before. Sadly, most of them never come back, but that's an issue I could address if I wasn't so half-arsed. 

My Blogger blog introduces me to more new people than anything else, and lets me publish just about anything. Slowly, tediously, but with more control over how and where it appears than just about anything.

Follow the arrows and you'll see my content gradually being stripped of its richness as it gets handed on to Facebook and my other social network platforms I have yet to abandon. At this stage it's still got the potential for images and video, but it gets separated into different modules and not all of it is shown to everyone I know on Facebook - some goes to one group but doesn't display for others.

Finally, at the Twitter level, I'd like just the txt pls, shrthnded enuf so it fits in 1 sms, but like right now, 2 the smllst grps of frnds i.e. 121.

In other words, I don't want my blog to become a vast bog roll of five years of my text haiku; I want my Twitter feed to be the best possible condensed goodness automagically gleaned from my Facebook page, which is automagically being updated from my Blogger blog.

Snap to it, frnds!  

Twittering the Melbourne Cup

twittering melbourne cup
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Next to HG and Roy calling the Melbourne Cup, my next favourite way to consume the Race That Stops The Nation would have to be Ben Barren, in the Bridge Hotel in Mordialloc, via Twitter. I can practically smell it.

There's a wombat awaiting moderation: what do you do?

Flickr Photo: Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, discuss pulling out of a wombat.

Thinking and talking a lot about social networks in my day job at the moment, particularly the old chestnut: "how do you balance risk against viralocity?" In other words, how do you ensure you don't kill the growth of your nascent social network by over-regulating what gets published? Will moderating content too much kill the pavlovian reward of "post-reply-reply-to-reply-repeat" that makes a social network sticky and compelling?

Why does that matter? Because woven tight into the good stuff, growing like weeds, you'll always find weird stuff also growing on your social networks, no matter what original purpose it has. Show me a user-generated content database, I'll show you some weird shit in there, every time.

Further, the line between "weird" and "bad" is wiggly, broad and fuzzy, with transparency set at >10% and sporting extra-aliased edges. Further, "bad" comes in a wide variety of flavours, including "bad for business", "bad for conservative families" and "bad for the legal budget line".

"Probably won't happen" is not an answer lead counsel is ever happy with, but most of us live our entire lives sheltering under it. As in, "I could be killed by a block of frozen pee falling from an airliner passing overhead, but... it probably won't happen".

To wit: vombatus ursinus.

A great example of bizarrely funny social action on Flickr: the "Better with a wombat" photo pool, where a small group of people with too much Photoshop-foo come together to insert wombats into photos. This classic example from Mike Monteiro has all the hallmarks of a great master: the wombat image has been inserted in front of the two men, above the documents on the table and behind the microphone, and the shadows cast on the papers and the shared perspective of the wombat and the media event photos combine to make it look like... well... a wombat at the Whitehouse.

Should it be there? That's a much easier question to answer than "Now it's there, should we remove it?" For every hour you waste anticipating the day you get asked the former, you'll waste 100 hours answering the latter again and again. There are few defamation case law precedents covering wombat insertion, fewer still case studies of conservative advocacy groups pressuring advertisers to pull media from sites featuring wombat-related satire. And none at all to suggest that this sort of wombat photo file sharing encourages bestiality or other illegal activity. Meanwhile, what do you do? The clock is ticking, the needle on the viralocity guage on your social network platform's dashboard interface is falling fast... what do you do?

Anytime someone tells you that your social network can and should be planned and closely moderated, remember this photo and the community that created it. Then ask yourself:

1. Do you really want to employ moderation staff to consider whether this stuff should be encouraged/discouraged/removed?
   
2. Ready to author and maintain terms of use agreements that anticipate this kind of random act? Up for authoring and maintaining the moderation guidelines your moderation team will need to refer to before acting on this image?
   
3. Think you can anticipate the spectrum of human weirdness your network might reveal and have all this in place, ready to strike it down before someone gets offended?
   

I don't. Instead, I say: let Petraeus and Crocker mount legal action first, which... probably won't happen. "Probably won't happen" is not an answer lead counsel is ever happy with, but most of us live our entire lives sheltering under it. As in, "I could be killed by a block of frozen pee falling from an airliner passing overhead, but... it probably won't happen".

Meanwhile, you have ample time to come up with a team process for rapid deletion and retraction. Few legal threats proceed once the content has been removed and a public retraction and apology issued. Fewer still result in signiciant material damages. Which you can fund from the savings you'll have made on legal and moderation services.

Meanwhile, wombats can roam free, doing what wombats do best: driving repeat visits, new content, new referrals, improving search relevance, increasing advertising impressions, and, of course, digging the largest burrows you are ever likely to see.

ZDNet tries harvesting an audience from Facebook

Facebook audience harvesting for publications
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

The Facebook platform is an extraordinary venue for reaching out to a large online audience and encouraging them to try your own web application. As you'd expect, I've been observing the evolution of Facebook closely, not only as a chance to poke my friends, but to observe a rapid and significant evolution in the way we attract and retain an audience.

In the first wave of Facebook platform apps, solo developers built little fun apps primarily to show off their own coding skills, without much thought given to driving app use or polishing the many bugs. Soon, there were a hundred ways to do more than poke a friend, or rate someone as hot or not.

In wave two, when most obvious Facebook app categories were populated with a few competitors, the more ambitious developers began re-coding their apps to focus on acquisition and retention, to ensure they'd win and then retain number one position in their category. But they were still apps that, for the most part, existed only on Facebook. They didn't try to leverage the platform to build their own audience. And they weren't any more commercial than the typical widget; they certainly weren't selling ad space.

In wave three, other major web applications such as Flickr, Twitter and Last.fm launched Facebook-specific apps tying their service to Facebook's user database, allowing consumers using both platforms to stay engaged with, say, Twitter, while Facebook was their front-most application. This was smart because the Facebook platform doesn't threaten the ownership of user data - if you unhook from Facebook later, you can take your users with you. There are more benefits than risks in building and deploying a Facebook version of your web app.

An online media business gets another UB, some more pageviews, some additional ad impressions. All from the most unlikely of sources... a Facebook app.

Here's a new wave that I've only just discovered: an online media business (in this case, ZDnet.com.au) building a Facebook app to try and gain some viral growth in their online audience by giving Facebook users something fun and engaging to try.

Initially, the Broadband Speed Challenge application does what many similar apps do - test your internet connection and give you a whizzo dashboard of animated dials to display just how fast your up- and downloads are.

This must have demanded some outside-the-square thinking at ZDnet - a media business used to writing up news and then selling ads on it - checking people's connection speed is not a core competency. But it's clever, it's useful, and it has relevancy, as you'll see in a minute.

BSC then goes further by allowing you to compare your net connection speed with your friends on Facebook, and invite your other Facebook friends to try the test for themselves. It's cool because it's something no other speed test application could do for you, since most speed test apps have a regular monthly audience of zip/zero/nada.

I was ever-so-slightly-stoked to learn that I had the fastest connection amongst the six friends who'd tried it so far. In yo face, suckas ;-)

i 8wn u suckas!

Then the app goes one smart step further and shows you some wifi/broadband feed headlines from ZDNet. Now, I haven't been a fan of ZDnet. I was a regular reader 3-4 years ago, but then I felt it headed downhill, and I haven't read it since. Until tonight, that is. I've learned the writing's improved, the research is better, the writers are more experienced, so I've resubscribed.

Would I change anything? Yes, I'd probably test the ubiquitous "invite all your friends to try this app" approach that most Facebook developers try. Yes, it's annoying, but it becomes less-so when every dang app you install tries it on. Note I said "test it", I didn't say "adopt it" - see how much it annoys your own subset of the Facebook audience first. I'd also test increasing the prominence of the ZDNet feeds, and see if that affected adoption, usage, or clickthrus to ZDnet.

In ye olde dayes, online social networks and web apps would shrivel and die without the help of online media businesses to build a brand and acquire an audience. Is this example a sign that maybe the relationship, in some cases, is being turned on its head?

An online media business gets another UB, some more pageviews, some additional ad impressions. All from the most unlikely of sources... a Facebook app. Well, I live and learn.

Social networking is so hot right now

I'm just back from Kenya and it's been so long since I posted, sorry, so while I pile all my dirty safari clothes into the washing machine, here's a quick post. Demetri Martin from The Daily Report explains social networking. At last, I understand!

Yahoo! still stays still for the camera

This is the earliest digital photo I have on online storage. Uploaded 10 December 2000, it's from a holiday to the NSW ski fields, looking down on some ducks that were skating around on the frozen lake in front of our hotel.

Anyway, for the last seven years it's been hosted with Yahoo! Photos, where it did almost nothing except take up 200k of disk space. Nobody much came and viewed it, nobody emailed it to a friend, nobody happened across it while browsing popular tags, nobody made a new friend as a result of viewing it, and crucially, nobody ever printed it out on a mug or a mousemat.

Not because it was a bad photo necessarily (though it might be) but because Yahoo! just failed to grok the social networking 2.0 wave that it helped touch off by launching web 1.0 market leaders like Yahoo! Messageboards, Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Bookmarks. Rather than grok it, Yahoo! was swamped by the wake of social networking 2.0 as it powered on past, floundering in the backwash of early precursors like eBay and Geocities, then by Flickr, MySpace and Facebook.

What is MySpace but Geocities with easier page editing and friend-finding? What is Facebook but Yahoo! Groups with an open API and some ajax? And what is Flickr but Yahoo! Photos plus social networking?

So in a few weeks my little duckies will be migrated across to live with my other photos on Flickr, where for the first time they will get pageviews, comments, favourites and other forms of sticky social interaction. All my little duckies will be in a row. Yahoo! had to pay reportedly USD35M for this to happen, when it probably had 4-5 years of breathing space to see this coming and just build it themselves.

Flickr was acquired in 2005, and since then, have we seen further significant innovations from the Flickr team? No, not really. It's taken them nigh-on two years to wait for management to summon up the courage to jam the two services together, fer chrissakes!

Should they add video uploading and sharing as a matter of urgency? You know they should. Will someone eat their lunch if they don't? Of course they will. Do they already know that, and are they constrained from doing it due to organisational lethargy and lack of dev resources?

Well, it wouldn't be the first time...