Bye bye Bebo

So long, Bebo. I won't miss you -- maybe now I can get to know my friends again in person. (From yesterday's Evening Herald)

By Susan Daly

Thursday April 08 2010

IT might sound a bit harsh to call a five-year-old a has-been. In the whizzy world of the internet though, half a decade is a long time. Bebo, born in 2005, has reached its sell-by date.

Technology giant AOL paid megabucks -- 850 million of them -- to acquire the social networking website two years ago. Now it has announced that it will be trying to sell its out-of-favour purchase. If all else fails, it will simply shut it down.

Wow. That's pretty brutal.

If Bebo were a boyband that had been jilted by its record label, we'd be bracing ourselves for the pictures of the cute one getting fat and the one with the talent starting to write hits for other, younger, starlets. In technology, as in the pop industry, when you're hot, you're white-hot. When you're not, you're stone-cold. There is no sentimentality and things get old real quickly.

It's so long Hannah Montana and hello Justin Bieber. (If you don't know who that is yet, ask a passing eight-year-old).

It might be worth bringing up the cautionary tale of Bebo the next time someone tells you that you absolutely must get on board the next big thing in technology. Beware anything that relies on mob rule to stay viable. The mob shifts its loyalty elsewhere and you're left alone, the only kid in your virtual playground.

Bebo needed to keep attracting new members. Every year saw a new launch -- Bebo Music, Bebo Books, Bebo Groups -- all promising to add to the experience of being part of the website's following.

Bless them, they tried so hard, and it's not entirely Bebo's fault. It's ours, we the public at www.fickle.com. As soon as something better or newer comes along, we're off.

I'm not pointing fingers at anyone but myself here. I opened a Bebo profile in 2005 when a friend sent an 'invitation' to everyone in her email address book. As long as the site remains open, it's probably still up there, listing my mid-Noughties likes (Britney Spears circa Toxic) and dislikes (White Chicks, the film).

Then the heat moved to MySpace, and so did I. I didn't even manage to get as far as specifying my gender on a profile there before Facebook caught my eye. Now I find myself drifting away from that too. I think the fatal bullet was when my aunt asked if I would be her friend on 'Myface'.

Now it's all about the quick buzz of updating my status 20 times a day on Twitter and instant messaging 'Twitpals'.

I'm enjoying it right now -- I work from home, so to me it's like access to an instant office canteen -- but I notice some of my old 'colleagues' have been checking in less frequently as of late. The novelty has worn off.

We didn't always need this constant change of scenery.

Why is it that for years we were happy enough with the eight-track tape and a clunky Walkman as the cutting-edge way to make music mobile?

Now, if your MP3 player is bigger than your fingernail, you're a Luddite.

It also seems that the easier that communication has become, the more difficult it has been to remain satisfied by it for even the briefest period of time.

Scientists have started to identify a strain of this perennial state of dissatisfaction. They're calling it adult ADHD.

The roots of this syndrome are behavioural. The more we are surrounded by distractions, the more we crave them.

I heard a word this week that made me step away from my netbook. 'Lapglancing': the act of watching TV while simultaneously tapping away at a laptop on your knee.

Remember what the word 'Bebo' actually stands for? 'Blog Early, Blog Often'. Now, isn't that an imperious call to the keyboard? It says something about the imperative, demanding nature of these 'social' sites. It implies that if you're not in, you can't win. And if you're not winning, then by definition, you're a loser.

It should be a comfort to know that these bits of gadgetry are ephemeral.

Bebo was the cool kid yesterday, but an outcast today.

It might remind us that we are lucky enough to still have real, live friends who are pretty much always where we last left them -- at the other end of the phone. (Okay, make the call on your iPhone if you must).

I think I'll invite some pals over for an evening of old-fashioned 'video-sharing', ie: watch a movie together, sitting on the same sofa in the same room.

Some things will never go out of fashion.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.herald.ie/opinion/susan-daly-so-long-bebo-i-wont-miss-you-maybe-now-i-can-get-to-know-my-friends-again-in-person-2129936.html

I twit, you twit, we all twit

Talking about Twitter to Tom Dunne on Newstalk this morning

A little tweetie bird told me...

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/rumours-of-sarkozy-and-brunis-affairs-were-just-the-latest-microblogging-windup-says-susan-daly-2102797.html

Sacre bleu! Who is telling tales on Twitter?
Rumours of Sarkozy and Bruni's affairs were just the latest micro-blogging wind-up, says Susan Daly

Jeff Goldblum is dead and so is Kanye West. Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy are having a ménage-à-quatre and eating pork will give you swine flu. Well, no, not really. All of these startling bits of 'news' have broken on Twitter.com in the past year -- and not one is true.

The micro-blogging website allows anyone in the world to set up an account and post unlimited messages of not more than 140 characters. Anyone can read them and anyone can 're-tweet' your message -- pass it on to their friends and followers from their own account.

In this way, a tweeted bit of 'news' can become like a game of Chinese whispers. The context in which it was written and the reliability of its source are lost in the mists of the Twittersphere.

Some of this mis-reporting is fairly victimless. (Literally so, in the case of the many celebrities who have been tweeted as deceased when they are not.) Actor Jeff Goldblum had his publicist release a statement to reassure fans that, "He is fine and in Los Angeles", a new twist on the Mark Twain classic that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated.

Some have wider-ranging consequences. In the early chaos of the Haitian earthquake, Twitter was buzzing with reports that two commercial airlines were running free flights for doctors and nurses to the country. A commendable action, but one the airlines had to deny publicly.

There were some instances where medical staff were being airlifted so there was a grain of truth in it. However, the subsequent kerfuffle detracted attention that needed to be re-focused on the plight of the Haitian people.

The same dangers that come with spreading gossip verbally also apply to false tweets. The fire might be put out by someone's publicist but the internet is a vast, uncharted territory where smoke lingers for a long time.

This has been the case with the French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni. Rumours of their affairs -- his with a cabinet minister; hers with a musician -- may have been greatly exaggerated. The French press has not been as interested in their private life as the international press has. (Mistresses, secret children and such extra-curricular activities are not considered to be of public interest there.)

The French magazine L'Express has broken le silence to state that the 'news' was created by a trainee French journalist who posted them on Twitter. It was an experiment to see how quickly unverified rumours could spread online.

The relentless pace of instant communication on Twitter means that rumours don't percolate -- they explode. The volume of people getting the message that Sarko and Bruni were at 'love loggerheads' gave it a critical mass, and it became mainstream 'news' overnight.

Now, despite the revelations about where the initial reports may have come from, Sarkozy and Bruni will forever have the cloud of doubt hanging over their marriage, at least in the public's mind. Bruni's statement about the chance of survival for the marriage in the aftermath of the story -- "I guess marriage should be forever but who knows what happens?" -- won't exactly have helped.

Yet the ability of Twitter to convey real news so speedily is one of its main attractions. It's why I joined it over a year ago, and why I continue to use it. I might be a freelance journalist, alone at my desk, but within an instant I can see what is preoccupying the world -- or at least the part that is on Twitter -- at that given moment.

I'm all for a forum where I can connect with interesting, like-minded people that I would never have otherwise met. Conversely, it's allowed me to gauge the opinions of people who are not so like-minded -- and that can be most interesting of all.

But it can be easy to forget how public it is. Posting a tweet is like shinning up the Spire and shouting your opinions through a loud-hailer.

Pop star Miley Cyrus discovered this to her cost. She abandoned Twitter when she realised it had begun to affect her privacy (what's left of it). "I'd tweet, 'I'm here,' and I'd wonder why a thousand fans are outside the restaurant," she said, "Well, hello, I just told them."

Actor and writer Stephen Fry liked that Twitter brought him in close contact with fans, but threatened to leave when one of his followers dared to brand him "boring".

The public nature of the site can blur the line between a professional and private persona -- a difficulty encountered by Sky Sports presenter Chloe Everton, who was given a slap on the wrist by her employers for her double entendre-laden tweets.

On the other hand, too much can be made of nothing just because the tweeter is high-profile. Newstalk presenter Sean Moncrieff, for example, had a tweet repeated and analysed in a Sunday newspaper last weekend, even though it was clearly a joke.

The tell-all technology -- it is just so easy to fire off an angry or emotional message and hit the 'Tweet' button -- can be all too tempting. We've had a woman tweeting that she was having a miscarriage in work, and another that her son had just fallen into a swimming pool and drowned. Both women were deemed to have 'over-shared' and roundly criticised.

A tweet might only allow 140 characters but those instances show it can carry an emotional punch above its weight. The brevity is the beauty of it, but not getting the full picture can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings. The key to safe twittering is this: don't tweet anything you're not prepared to say to someone's face IRL (that's 'In Real Life', folks).

And another one...

...from everymonday.ie
Because today is - Monday!

http://www.everymonday.ie/technology/331-twitter-away-at-any-age.html

My trumpet-playing goldfish

Was on the Tom Dunne Show on Newstalk this morning shooting the breeze about IKEA. Got this message on Twitter shortly afterwards -
BrianConnhttp://twitpic.com/fbi7a - @BiddyEarly I'm a media broadcast monitor and look what I sent to Ikea earlier!about 2 hours ago from TwitPic

Thanks Brian! Hopefully IKEA will voice their gratitude for the mention in the form of a new armchair.
This was what he sent to them.... I LOVE that the next item on the show was about a piano-playing cat. Prime Time, here I come!