Social Capital – What’s it Worth?

I’m reasonably sure, despite various comments from parents, colleagues and partners that I don’t feature on the autistic spectrum of behaviour – well, no more than the next geek anyway. I will confess to taking an interest in how I interact on the social web though, spurred on by a couple of sites I have found mildly diverting. PeerIndex and Klout.

Both sites purport to measure influence and they do so by tracking your use of the social web. PeerIndex asks you to register such things as your Twitter id, Facebook, Quora and Blogs and then divines a result based on retweets, comments etc. It presents its findings in the context of reach (number of people engaged with), Authority (Divined by number of people engaged with in the topics you typically comment on) and Activity (the volume of content generated).

I approached PeerIndex with some trepidation as I figured the sheer range of topics I engage with would militate against me. I blog at length on Music, Politics, Social Media, Photography, IT, Television and Film. Having worked in all of these industries except thank god, politics, I figure I may have something to say – on politics I admit, I’m simply venting!

Initially, my worst fears were quickly realised – with every fresh post, it seemed my authority rating diminished, while that accorded to more focused (ok, monomaniacal) contributors such as Jemima Kiss, Armando Ianucci and Guido Fawkes (one visualisation in the dashboard compares your rating with that of posters you have interacted with) were gaining credibility with every post. Personal Branding it seems, works. After several weeks, I noticed a peculiar thing – my authority rating began to rise as the search and analysis tools took on more of my output. This was encouraging and reflected in the visualisations presented on the dashboard page.

PeerIndex is at worst, engaging. The feeds it takes are limited, so I have not been able to register all of my blogs and I would like to see Flickr added to the list of defaults, but I like this tool and the possibilities it raises are interesting. We have the technology now to graft analyses onto vast quantities of data and I expect to see social media being used far more effectively by the bodies that are most threatened by it – broadcasters, record companies and newspapers. If the tools used by PeerIndex were applied to, for example, tracking the contents of Facebook pages looking for content related to a single artist, program or film, it might yield some interesting information about the makeup of the audience – and critically, where to find them.

Klout takes a different approach – analysing Twitter and Facebook interaction in terms of influence divined by amplification and reach – in other words, the more likes and retweets accumulated, the higher the score. This seems very satisfactory, at least until I noticed the tool registered my most influential topic as Cricket. A game I follow with the fanaticism of a Yorkshireman, but have never to my knowledge offered an opinion online. Perhaps this puts the value of my online opinions into a new and even more unflattering perspective!

I think that Klout is in the business of identifying influencers for the purpose of marketing. It has always been critical in PR to identify influencers – this is how we used to promote nightclubs back in the nineties and it defines the relationship between for example, Katie Price, The Press and her customers – the people that pay to have her open a shop, nightclub etc. If she didn’t generate the press, she would not be considered to be so influential and her value would decrease. What Klout appears to be doing is identifying influencers who are influential because they tap into a large following based on expertise, not notoriety. That could be a powerful asset indeed.

Digital Derelicts

I was interested to read Cory Doctorow’s musings on the Digital Economy Bill in yesterday’s Guardian, ‘Why does Mandelson favour the analogue economy over the digital’. The Digital Economy bill is indeed as pernicious a piece of legislation as we’ve seen from the present government, but to reduce it to a simple analogue vs. digital argument is overly simplistic in my opinion. It also begs a comparison.

Disco of Doom
It is well known that business controls government in none too subtle a fashion. When push comes to shove, fear of lost tax revenue delayed the banning of smoking in public places, costing hundreds of thousands of lives as governments on both sides of the Atlantic dithered in the face of industry pressure and published falsified data designed to obscure the link between smoking and cancer. We see similar pressure being exerted on our government by the music and film industries now, as instead of embracing new delivery channels, they seek to preserve their crumbling analogue monopolies by legislation. The irony here is that the one person in the music industry who has displayed a flair for innovative thinking has chosen to use it not to promote music, but to generate vast quantities of personal power and cash. Simon Cowell, whatever else he may be is not a force for the good of music.

Monopolies
X-Factor is effectively a monopoly. It determines the number one single in a way that is unprecedented. Simon Cowell promotes the show, profits from the show, signs the acts, profits from their recordings and spits them out when he’s finished. Unpleasant as that may be, it’s not in itself any different from music business as usual. What is different is that he has found a way to use TV as both a marketing vehicle and a ‘talent’ pool. It’s not the dismal quality of the acts that bothers me – it’s the power of the monopoly. It worries me because I’m seeing it elsewhere and in Cory Doctorow’s simplistic reduction of Mandelson’s bill to digital vs. analogue I’m seeing something that worries me a lot. A blinkered assumption that Digital = Good, Analogue = Bad.

Digital Derelicts
Two years ago, I said that social software was opening up new opportunities, enabling new ways for human beings to connect, fostering the exchange of ideas across continents and cultures. I think it does deliver on all of these points, but Cory Doctorow’s throwaway remark about homeless people scavenging discarded netbooks actually stopped me in my tracks. Because the divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ is getting wider, not narrower.

We have an underclass out there who are unable or unwilling to embrace the digital world and are finding themselves progressively more alienated and more unable to cope with the simple transactions in life than ever before. Booking holidays, Banking, Borrowing, everyday activities that digitally enabled, deliver freedom of choice on an unprecedented scale to the digerati.

Paradox
So, where is the problem? Well, the problem is right there in front of us. We are creating freedom of choice in a digital world, but in exploiting our right to choose, paradoxically we are closing our options down. The digital economy is ruthless and it has resulted in prices being driven ever lower. We have seen in recent weeks, Borders the bookseller bankrupted because most people now prefer to buy their books from the supermarket at knock down prices, or from Amazon.

We have seen, as recently as this week, MySpace announce a radical change in their delivery model to enable it to retain an audience that has been stampeding towards Facebook. Bebo…do they still exist? We have a single messaging solution, Twitter, enthusiastically embraced by celebrities, politicians, sportsmen…the world. And it’s good. No doubt about it. We have new opportunities for consultancy as business strives to compete for the attention of their target demographic. While we focus on ‘leveraging our mecosystems’ © , the monoliths that make up the digital universe are getting bigger and more powerful in a way that will ultimately prove to be limiting – we are not creating bests of breed, we are instead complicit in the all conquering power of the organisations with the best business model.  Facebook, Twitter….This is not always a good thing. X Factor? Big Brother? The producer of Big Brother was recently heard to say that ‘British Television has never been more innovative’. I wonder what Dennis Potter might have to say on that subject.

The Invisible Tweet
And so here is the question that irks me about the social software monoliths….what happens to somebody if they are excluded from one or other of these monoliths? That only happens to other people right? Well no, it can happen to you, or me. In fact in a small way it has happened to me. I run a music blog, Chimera Musica and have set it up to send one line reviews to Twitter. A harmless enough activity and who knows, perhaps the recommendation of a song might brighten somebody’s day. It’s unlikely to make it worse! At any rate, one day last week I was logged in to my personal account and decided, out of curiosity, to look at my music blog’s Twitter profile. So I typed the name into the search – no results. Hmmm, odd… I thought. I typed a couple of other searches – name of song and act that I had recommended – no results. It’s worth noting at this stage that these tweets do not contain a link to the blog.   To cut a long story short, Twitter reserve the right to block from their search listings, any user that they suspect of anti-social activities such as spamming, from their search engines. So apparently, recommending music is deemed to be anti social….well ok, I have questionable taste, but anti-social?

The point of this is not to rectify the issue with Twitter, actually I couldn’t care less about the invisible tweets, the real point is that I don’t have a choice – there is no equivalent social network with the same reach that I could use for the simple recommendation of a song.

Monopolies come at a price. That price is nowhere more evident than it is online. As Murdoch readies himself to take on Google, one thing only is for sure. We, the consumers will end up poorer.  I am now, at least as far as Twitter is concerned, a digital derelict. Look out for your netbooks…

Social Media and Public Relations

These are interesting times, as the economy buckles and sways under the onslaught of rising debt and falling sales, the new economy, espoused by Wired magazine back at the turn of the century suddenly seems relevant again. As traditional companies fall by the wayside, a new breed of Digital Media Agency is poised to leapfrog the traditional PR practice and take the art of promotions into the 21st Century.

For traditional PR companies, the art of publicising a brand, be it a drink, a musician or a charity, is well established. Essentially, market research gives a picture of the current awareness of the brand and of the temperature of public opinion. This is compared to the desired state for the brand and a strategy is created that moves public opinion from the current position to the would-be position. At least, that’s the theory.

Most campaigns have a certain amount in common. Traditional media such as Print, Radio and Television are used to host advertising campaigns whilst promotional slots are arranged with ‘influencers’ appropriate to the desired brand. So an interview set up with Jonathan Ross for example on prime time BBC National Television will have a massive influence on the intended audience and will reinforce the effect of a straightforward advertising campaign.

Nowadays however things are changing. It’s hard to get a slot on the Jonathan Ross show and there are only a limited number of slots available in a season. Didn’t somebody say Facebook had over 300 million users? Hang on a minute! Jonathan Ross averages only 3.5 million…. and so logic being what it is, a new industry is born.

Given those figures, a digital media campaign ought to be able to deliver unprecedented conversion rates – shouldn’t it? Well a measure of caution may be appropriate – advocacy is often blinded by a fatal mixture of naivety and hope. There are a number of very significant factors, reducing the potential of digital campaigns to much more realistic figures. For example the degree to which a large audience might identify with the brand. Is it global or niche? Is it possible to correctly identify the location of the target audience? We know that Facebook tends to attract young professionals, creatives, writers and artists, that MySpace attracts a younger audience that is interested in music and movies but within those broad demographics, how easy is it to get to the target audience?

Let’s examine a case.

The movie ‘End of the Line‘ is a documentary which puts forward the idea that if current fishing practices are allowed t ocontinue unchecked, we may as a species succeed in turning our oceans into a primordial sludge supporting only single cell organisms – within our lifetimes. Apart from the compelling nature of the subject matter, a few things make this film especially interesting.

The film has now run for four weeks in the West End of London and has been picked up by cinemas around the country, with bookings until the end of September. The cause has been taken up by mainstream mass media - the Sun, Hello and Heat magazine,  as well as regional and local papers and the entire national press.

It has also engaged with the corporate world in ways no one can remember any other British film doing. The head of a major High Street presence, Pret a Manger, saw an early screening and changed his entire company’s policy on tuna.

Waitrose put backing into the making of the film and even Morrisons is now advertising some of its fish as line-caught.

The fact that the film has struck such a chord with the people and companies who have seen it has put the issues in the film on the political agenda, in ways they were not before.

This is remarkable stuff – and unprecedented for a documentary to cause this much of a ruckus. Here are some more facts.

1. Facebook profile - 4,596 fans
2. YouTube trailer – 41,566 views
3. Twitter page – 2,225 followers
4. Claim your Piece of Ocean Campaign

Notwithstanding the emotive content of the film and I’m quite sure it would have had a substantial impact in it’s own right. it has undoubtedly benefitted to some degree from a well orchestrated PR campaign based primarily on using Social Software to raise the profile of the film. How was this done?

The film was backed by a web site and merchandising, so far, so Web1.0, but where this movie moves away from the mainstream is in it’s espousal of Web2.0 sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and it’s innovative use of a web site hosted campaign that gives viewers a chance to make their presence felt. What is especially interesting is that Twitter was added almost as an afterthought – a fact which is reflected in the comparitively low number of followers.

It is possible to visualise a campaign, something like the figure here. Web1.0 technology, traditional media, funding etc all have a part to play.

The key to leveraging Web2.0 technology is in fostering a sense of community, and it is on Facebook and YouTube that viewers have the chance to make their opinions known.

It is this sense of involvement that encourages users to return and continue the conversation, and critically, to recommend the site to their friends. In this way, it is possible to encourage almost exponential growth for a message which has a universal meaning. It might be more difficult to stimulate the same degree of growth for a line of clothing or a CD, but the principle remains the same.

Twitter has a particular characteristic that gives it huge potential in this space, the character limit of 140 and the inclusion of a URL make it possible to attach a clickable link to an irresistable tag line. This is a very different notion to the idea of pirating the hash tag to insert a completely inappropriate advertisment into the trending topics. Retweets spread the link virally and the takeup, relying entirely on the suitability of the content to the task in hand could encourage users to self select – I’m reminded of a campaign that ran in the New Musical Express in the mid seventies, to promote the T. Rex album The Slider – the first few weeks a teaser campaign ran consisting of a small photograph printed on multiple pages – a rear view of Marc Bolan, unidentifiable except perhaps for the trademark curls. After a couple of pages, the photograph appeared with a caption, printed large across the photograph “Bolan’s Back”. The campaign scored a bullseye with the intended audience and the album was a substantial hit. In a sense, the same kind of opportunity is available with Twitter, a tag line, sufficiently intriuging to deliver the click through would serve to tickle the appetite of the target audience.  The beauty of Twitter is that the model dictates that anything resembling spam would die a death, Twitter depends on retweets to spread the message.

The key to success in harnessing the power of Web2.0 technology is to engage the audience with a strong message, and interesting content, to choreograph the interconnectivity of multiple forms of social media in a pattern that reinforces the message, keeps content fresh and encourages the audience to revisit and to pass the message on. Blogging, Web Sites with a high degree of interactivity, Facebook, Youtube and Flickr may all have a part to play.

2009 – The Year Of The Ox

Futurology is notoriously ‘hit or miss’, we generally fail miserably with specifics, even in prosperous and optimistic times, so in this new dawning of recession and strife, not forgetting famine, plague and pestilence, it seems more appropriate than usual to turn to the generalists for advice. We live in interesting times!

The Chinese astrologer Han Teen See has these observations on the new year:

2009 The year of The Ox will be a very intense year. The many significant incidents that occur will be sudden and deadly. The year will be filled with many more wars, military engagements and terrorist atrocities compared to previous years. Military forces worldwide will be more aggressive and active which will signify the greater likelihood of wars and military engagements in selected regions of the world……

…..People will generally be more aggressive, impulsive and quick-tempered with such behavior spreading quickly like wild-fire. Direct conflicts, arguments and disputes will occur more frequently…..

…..There will be an increase of both organizations and individuals adopting unethical or illegal methods to benefit themselves this year. It will imply that corruption, evasion of proper business practices, tax evasion and fraud will be on the rise.

Companies and businesses that have expanded too rapidly and have done so without taking into account their cash flow and resource management will suffer badly this year. Furthermore, those companies and businesses that have not been giving fair value to their customers and clients will be badly affected as well. This is because, both customers and clients alike will be more selective in their choice of products and services and will choose those that give them fair value….

And so to The Edge. For those unfamiliar with this organisation, The Edge is a forum, drawing together some of the brightest minds in a spectrum covering science, the arts, education, and asking once a year, a question germane to the time. The annual question for 2009, perhaps picking up the theme of relentless gloom and despondency was ‘What will change everything?’

Brian Eno, offers this as his answer: “The feeling that things are inevitably going to get worse” ! The point he is making, is that the history of progress has been founded on a certainty that better things are around the corner. Optimism and hope have been practically hardwired into the psyche of the western world. What happens when that optimism and hope is removed? When we start to see the walls closing in, the world shrinking? Well, in Eno’s view, something remarkably similar to the predictions of  Han Teen See.  The emphasis will be on short term gain, once survival becomes a driver, selflessness becomes a distant memory and in politics and business, global initiatives fail because trust will fail – the moral framework breaks down and law and order quickly follow….Cormac McCarthy – The Road becomes the new reality. As an answer to the question, Eno is undoubtedly right – this is root cause.

So pestilence and plague it is then…or is it? This is one of those points in time where we have a choice, as individuals and collectively. The choices we make today may very well set the tone for the next hundred years. These are my predictions for the year.

This is a year where the buck stops. I fear for the bio-technology industry, as an occasional investor I headed for the safer havens of  mainstream technology six months ago – and still lost more than I care to admit. More than any other sector of technology, bio-tech depends on research money, government projects etc etc. It has never been profitable and in current economic conditions, unless the model is substantially revised, I expect to see the sector struggle.

Web2.0 is a set of technologies, desperately short of a profit model. for all it’s targeted advertising, has anyone ever actually bought anything via Facebook? These applications are fabulous, revolutionary even, but unless somebody works out how to make money from them, we can expect to see turbulence ahead. My tip for survival – Vox. A hosted blogging application including many of the social software favourites such as file sharing, music, photos etc. It is aimed at the smaller community, organisations and families, and in so doing provides a sense of identity that could be converted into a selling point. The difference between Vox and Facebook is that Facebook encourages mass socialisation, and in so doing exposes its members to the scrutiny of strangers. Not everybody is enthused by this model. Vox encourages privacy and this could turn out to be a differentiator worth paying for.

More generally, I’d expect to see businesses and governments start to prepare themselves for the new reality. This is a time for strong vision and fearless leadership. At government level we should expect to see an upsurge in technology mediated education – we’ve been talking about it for long enough, let’s see action! Dare we also anticipate an upgrading of the IT infrastructure such that fast broadband is achievable in every home?

The motor industry is one to watch – Toyota posted a loss for the first time in fifty years? Ford, Chrysler and General Motors had to be bailed out by the US government. The message is modernise or fail. We should see these companies ruthlessly stripped back to fighting weight, better use of technology, resulting in better knowledge retention and less waste.

I expect to see customers demand value for money – the first green shoots are beginning to appear already. I was able to negotiate a discount of 20% before Christmas, on designer clothes purchased in the high street. If you don’t ask, you won’t get.  Services will be more realistically priced because there are so many alternatives. The wild fluctuations in transport pricing should start to level out – my favourite recent example being the purchase of a flight from Edinburgh to Belfast for less than £1 + airport taxes, the next day, being asked by Virgin Rail to pay more than £250 for a rail ticket from London to Manchester. I decided not to travel that day. If the UK government wants to get people to use the trains instead of the roads, then we need to regulate pricing. The excuses being trotted out by Virgin and their ilk (passengers paying for the running of underused services) are the same excuses used in the sixties, before the rail networks were nationalised. They simply don’t wash a second time. Businesses who are seen to be exploiting their customer base are at risk. That’s all there is.

In the end, 2009 is an opportunity. It’s my hope that governments, businesses and individuals start to make the right decisions, to enable freedom of movement globally, to encourage global cooperation and trust and in so doing enable a return to prosperity. It is my darkest fear that they won’t.

The New Facebook

So as everybody surely noticed, Facebook has been migrating its users to the new layout over the last month or so. This week has been particularly trying, with menu items disappearing, switching positions, links failing, and most mysteriously applications evaporating…

We seem to be experiencing design by committee and there is a danger that we end up with a dromedary. Some of the changes are hard to fathom, some are probably driven by disgruntled application providers, some may be driven by user feedback. Certainly all the symptoms of a project not being thought through are present and correct!

The migration has caused a degree of consternation in the user population, as the new design represents a fairly major paradigm shift and ushers in a user experience that further differentiates the ‘book from its competitors.

There is an underlying theme – Facebook is looking like a more mature and businesslike application, and in this Facebook is playing to its consumer base. If we take a sample of the major social sites, and align them to their user bases, you get a spectrum that puts LinkedIn at one extreme, Bebo at the other and positions Facebook and MySpace somewhere in the middle. Facebook has steadily carved out a niche as the creative professionals preferred site, leaching users from LinkedIn in the process – MySpace has similarly captured the up and coming musicians and teenagers. The new Facebook consolidates this positioning and will continue to polarise the user base accordingly.

Facebook 2.0 Home

The new look takes Facebook further into Portal territory – instead of a single page, infested with useless crap whimsical applications, the default profile and home layouts divide the users domain between a number of different tabs. The default home page is the Feed, with items filtered into Status Updates, Photos, Posted Items, and the default News showing a judicious mix of all three – the user can choose to see more or less items from any individual. this I think is a major improvement and offers the user some control – the noisiest people need no longer dominate the space.

The Profile is the area that seems to be causing the most pain to the users, and by messing about with the navigation, ‘in flight’ Facebook is trashing one of the fundamental rules of GUI design – consistency has been abandoned in recent days as menu items shed functionality and swap places with all the orchestration of a vexatious gibbon. One wonders for example why they found it necessary to switch the position of the Home and viewable Profile (Chris Wright) links?

When the new look was first unveiled, the first thing I did was jettison a whole slew of applications that had accumulated like paperclips on my profile, the default tabs offering Wall, Info, Photos and the imaginatively titled Boxes (applications). An extra tab makes it possible to add an application with it’s own tab – however it is sadly not possible to create a tab and move a bunch of similar applications into it. ‘Reading’, ‘Writing’, ‘Listening’ for example.

Facebook 2.0 Profile

For a few weeks it has been possible to add applications without assigning them to a page, a fabulous idea which I wholeheartedly approve of, software on demand! Access was possible via the Applications Bookmark. This promised a clutter free environment and a laudably usable navigation. Unfortunate then that this is now restricted to the Wall, the one place I didn’t want applications to appear! The ready access to application bookmarks via the Applications tab has been replaced by an apparently unconfigurable bottom bar which ushers in a new low (sic) in pointless and unusable navigation facilities. So if I want to use or view an application today, I have to navigate to the page that it lives on – how tedious, and so last year! I suspect that the application providers were behind the rethink, perhaps reasoning that a visible application will get installed by more people. Shame.

Facebook has dropped another clanger in restricting the tabs to a single application – let’s explore an alternative: I am a voracious reader and writer – I have installed many applications that are connected by this behaviour – for example, the peerless ‘Just Three Words’, Visual Bookshelf’, ‘WordPress’ etc. I’d like to be able to group these under a single tab, or at worst to be able to nest my tabs. This is not possible today, and worse, some applications don’t support pages, so there is no option but to place them in ‘Boxes’. This capability has been around in portals for several years, so I wonder why Facebook are making such a mess of it?

So in keeping with my theme:

Magic

Tabs
Wall
Filtered Feed

Lies

No user controlled Nested Tabs
Ever ‘improving’ top level navigation
dysfunctional javascript
application navigation

I have no doubt that the coming weeks will see more improvement and perhaps even stability. I’m optimistic and actually, despite moaning horribly about the many implementation issues we are being subjected to, I prefer the new look. I expect to be updating this post – the sooner the better!

Update 14.09.08

The application list in the bottom left hand corner is now configurable – reorder by dragging. applications also appear on profile – box mid-right.

Are Friends Electric?

I was reading Mariella Frostrup in the Observer last weekend as I tend to do over Sunday breakfast. She is remarkably level headed for someone who, like me, used to work in the music industry and something she said made me think hard about the nature of on-line friendship.

The context was not promising – her correspondent was considering having an affair with a long lost lover, recently contacted on Facebook and Mariella quite correctly and with great wit pointed out the obvious flaws in such a notion. She went on to say (and I apologise for the paraphrase, but it was a long article)

“As for Facebook forays, I must say I remain unconvinced by the so-called ‘social networking’ craze….. There are unarguable merits to an impoverished kid in Uganda connecting with a privileged western teenager and both learning something about the outside world, but how often is that the case? Facebook and its fellow sites offer teenagers a virtual social circle, and dissatisfied adults the chance to sit alone in a cloud of nostalgia. All fine and good if you have hours to waste ‘connecting’ on the most superficial level. It’s hardly revolutionary to suggest that the more time we spend on virtual friendships the less time and energy we have for our own flesh and blood encounters. Why show your holiday photos to 200 virtual strangers when you can sit down with your best friend and chat?“

Its at this point that Mariella and I differ. Now there are a lot of strands in this and I may even take two posts to cover them, but these, I think, are the salient points.

Mariella differentiates between virtual friendships and ‘flesh and blood’ encounters. I may be missing the point here, but not one of my virtual friendships has actually replaced a real life encounter, anymore than the telephone.

On line friendships, just like real life friendships can burn brightly, I have many online friends who I would count as ‘real’ friends in terms of warmth, reliability, humour, and well, friendship. Equally I have many online friends who I have shared a joke with, sparred with on a comment trail or just bumped into so often that we made contact – no more significant than smiling at somebody in the post office really. and that is my point – it’s the baggage attached to the term ‘Friend’ that I think confuses people of a certain age (sorry, Mariella, but you and me, both).

People of ahem, my generation (born in the fifties) tend to attach a great deal of meaning to the word friend – acquaintances are many but friends are few, we differentiate between friends and networks in a way that a teenager today would probably think odd or even quaint. So it’s hardly surprising that we struggle with the concept of social software – however it would be a huge mistake to dismiss it as frivolous.

Let’s start with the common misconception that putting your holiday photos online is the same as inviting 200 virtual strangers into your life. People are attracted to content first and personality second. I have proof. I run three blogs, this one on technical matters, Chimera Obscura on music and Grapes of Wrath (a work of total fiction). The comparison between the growth cycles is interesting, but I’ll save it for another post. The point I’m making here is that unless the photographs are extraordinarily good, it is unlikely that anyone will view them for more than a nanosecond. frankly, getting them printed in an old fashioned photolab will bring more browsers to your holiday snaps! No, the only people who will look at them on Facebook are your ‘friends’. And by and large their commentary will be funny and well, friendly.

But this is not only about Facebook, the Blogosphere too has a part to play, this debate is about social networks mediated by electronic means and I look back to commentators like Howard Rheingold (Virtual Communities) and Nicholas Negroponte (Being Digital) when I hear people discussing this phenomenon as if it were new. In many ways, you get out of a virtual community roughly what you put into it – socially active people have more friends, just like real…. yes, quite.

As for “connecting on the most superficial level”, what’s not to like? Sorry – seriously, I have managed to make some good friends who have introduced me to music, literature and art that I was not previously aware of – by the most serious and old fashioned of definitions, these people deserve to be called ‘friends’. I also have many ‘friends’ online who have brightened my day in a host of different ways – a Tweet here, a comment there, a photo.

As a mobile IT consultant, living a percentage of my life in hotels, I can unequivocally maintain that reconnecting with old friends is a fabulous thing – through Facebook I have connected with very close college friends with whom I lost touch over thirty years ago, ex colleagues, ex students who I am always delighted to see, but somehow never have the time or the geography to actually meet – I have yet to be disappointed. Quite the reverse in fact. I connect with other literary enthusiasts and engage with writing workshops, none of which would be possible in real life (just too busy). The world of asynchronous communication facilitates these activities and as a result, my life is substantially enriched.

I struggle with the difference between a virtual social circle and any other kind – in fact the toast ‘to absent friends’ surely celebrates the notion of a virtual social circle – the days of living in the same town as your friends were numbered by the invention of the steam engine. Actually come to think of it I wish some of my real friends were a bit more virtual! My social life and that of many people I speak to has been fractured by careers, marriages, divorce, relative success and failure. I would probably struggle to put together a real social circle – tennis friends, musicbiz friends, work friends, old friends, new friends – not an iota of commonality between them!

The age range of my virtual friends stretches between 22 and 75, the class, geography and culture range is undeniably greater than my ‘flesh and blood’ friendships and in considering this I am reminded of a remark made by one of my younger, virtual friends. “Facebook” she said, “is a great leveller”.