Garter says that microblogging is in the period of technology trigger which is defined as “The first phase of a hype cycle is the “technology trigger” or breakthrough, product launch or other event that generates significant press and interest.”  I agree with this to a certain extent but over the past few months with the Death of Michael Jackson and Iranian Twitter drama, it seems to have skipped straight to the slope of enlightenment (Although the press may have stopped covering the technology, some businesses continue through the “slope of enlightenment” and experiment to understand the benefits and practical application of the technology.)  CNN, Sky News and lots of user media sources now use Twitter to broadcast news, receive news and questions/thoughts from guests and even my aunt is on Twitter.  A little twitter bird once told me that one major newspaper, projects a giant tweetdeck onto a wall and decides on tomorrow’s news by the most trending topics.

In the hypergrowth that defines social media, it doesn’t take long for something to become obselete and new forms to come in.  I fell out of blogging due to the time it takes to aggregate thoughts and my lack of niche i.e. lack of ability to add value.  In my blogging days, I used to enjoy receiving numerous comments and getting tons of hits but wordpress did alot of the SEO for me.  I was also a power user on Digg so received a plethora of hits that way.  I decided to get back into blogging because it’s good for the research work I’ll be doing into social media and from a disgusting PR perspective i.e. it’s pointless being a social media guy without a social media presence.

I’ve been fairly slow to blog since I set up this site but today Eirepreneur picked up on a hastily written blog post I wrote.  He kindly commented and RT’ed and I received loads of hits and three comments within an hour so I was well happy and am a bit buzzed about it all. Imagine if I posted more and put in more effort :).

The point of this post is Blogging still has value but only if you have something interesting to say and something to add. The majority of Bloggers say “O look at me, I’m mad, I have an iPhone, I know what Twitter is, I’m web savvy,” i.e. I’m an individual just like everyone else *Yawn*  I’ve subscribed via RSS to a lot of blogs in my time but these are the only ones which have remained that I read.  We’re talking of a list of 300 down to about 10.  These blogs all have a niche and add some sort of value to readers.  Hence, they are win.  These include:

Nialler9 – Amazing music blog.  Description here

Twenty Major - Lulz Factory – Satirical Look at Irish society?

Web 2.0 Ireland – Does exactly what it says on the tin and does it very well.

There’s been considerable online buzz for Gangstar online the past few days and if you haven’t heard it’s the iPhone’s GTA 3+ equivalent.  (Link to Gangstar developer here and review here.)

I NEVER buy applications EVER but decided to purchase this one as a treat due to my love of GTA.  As Murphy’s Law would have it, the first thing I ever buy from App Store goes tits up on me.

The thing about the game is that it is stalls alot.  You turn a corner, it stalls.  You get into a car, it stalls. Well, at least for my beautiful, jailbreakless iPhone and judging by iTunes reviews, Twitter and general internet buzz, it’s stalling for others too.  It was very frustrating and I got no feedback from Gamesloft at all.

Solution to the problem:

• Before you play, restart your iPhone.  This frees up memory and makes it easier for the game to run.  I tried force quitting all applications with no luck.  Restarting your iPhone is a fairly obvious solution I know, but who turns off their iPhone? I don’t think it’s every been off since I got it, just a few restarts.

If that doesn’t work solely, (and it didn’t for me) then I recommend using the iPhone flight mode feature which will turn off all mobile services and WiFi, thus allowing more free memory space for Gangstar to run.  Make sure you turn it back on though when you’re finished or you won’t receive calls, sms etc.

The game is a lot less challenging than GTA in terms of missions and they storyline is a bit drab.  Also, after about 5 minutes into it, you realise that it’s like you’ve taken a step back in time and not in a good Marty McFly way. Gangstar has nothing new to offer except chronic pins and needles.

Social Networks are a funny old thing that tend to be segregated by geography, age, gender, interests etc. etc.  Perhaps, the biggest factor in choosing a social network platform is your friends and family as they’re the people you’ll want to link with.  The next factors will probably be the stage you’re at in life; if you are an emo, you may be on myspace, college student or graduate on facebook and professionals might be on LinkedIn etc. (I have yet to see an Emo on LinkedIn :P)

Social Media user bases are hard to come by and most certainly exaggerated when disclosed by the platform in question as they want to attract as many advertising clients as possible.  Facebook professes to have over 250 million active users, Twitter won’t release their user base but I have heard between 6 and 24 million which is astounding to stay the least from a comparison point of view.  If hypergrowth is the distinguishing characteristic of social networks, do we measure by that metric instead of overall users?  For the moment, we’ll let it be.  All you need to know for this post, is that social media and social networks are buzzing right now.

Bebo was the predominant social network in Ireland a few years ago and it swept the country by storm.  Lots of people lost their social network virginity on the platform but the majority of users have grown up and moved onto the mammoth that is Facebook, or so I thought.  For a recent project, I was looking at Bebo and to my surprise, people were still using it despite it being a haven for spam and the whole platform being heuristically vom-worthy.

I decided to take a look at the statistics for Bebo and found that:

• It’s traffic ranked peaked in late 2008 and has been falling significantly since 2009.
• The time the average user spends on the website has dropped significantly over the past three months (from 17.1 minutes to 14.6 minutes.)
• Pageviews per user has also decreased significantly, dropping from 24 to 19.7 over the space of three months and even more significantly over the past year.

Not Good.

If we compare Bebo, Twitter and Facebook in terms of daily traffic rank trend since 2008, we also see that Facebook is growing steadily, twitter is growing the fastest and Bebo is slowly dwindling off.

After looking at Bebo and a plethora of profiles in my address book and onwards, I’ve concluded or it’s my humble opinion that Facebook Killed The Bebo Star.  All that remains on Bebo is ghost profiles of teenagers who have grown up and went to college or traveled the world and made new friends who weren’t on Facebook forcing them to move platform.  The people who still actively use Bebo i.e. teens and pre teens add to it’s heuristic vom-worthiness by using language such as this:

Shakespeare must be spinning in his grave.

It’ll be interesting to see how AOL manage and maintain Bebo over the coming years and indeed whether they’ll keep it or not.  The one thing about social networks is that there are relatively high switching costs, i.e. the longer you spend on a social network linking with friends, uploading photos, tagging etc. the less likely you will change platforms.  It didn’t really matter in the case of the switch from Facebook to Bebo because Facebook is arguably a superior platform but what are the odds that users will swarm back to Bebo as Facebook gets used more?  Slim to none.  The key defining factor for Bebo’s future and it’s success will be if the number of people between 13-18 year is greater than 18-35 year olds.

It’s also interesting to note that as Facebook becomes ubiquitous and it’s current users (fastest growing demogrpahic is 35+) start to have children, will Facebook become uncool i.e. my Mom and Dad are on Facebook, it must be lame, I’m going to go to SocialNetwork2015 instead?