Internet – Page 174 – Stilgherrian

02 August 200726 August 2020

iYomu: “Social Networking for Grown Ups”?

“Every single person working in the media today who experienced the dot-com bubble in 1999 to 2000 believes that we are going through the exact same process and can expect the exact same results — a bust. It’s dÃ©jÃ vu all over again. And since this moment in time is only the beginning of the cycle, the best nuttiness has yet to emerge.”

It’s ironic reading those words by John C Dvorak the very day after seeing last night’s demo of iYomu, the “Social Networking for Grown Ups” website to be launched on 13 August. It’s also rather nostalgic.

iYomu is entering an over-hyped marketplace. MySpace is the biggest of the social media websites — pig-ugly and (last time I bothered with it) a tad unreliable. But it’s got 201 million users. If MySpace were a country, it’d be 5th-largest. Facebook is flavour of the month, “only” 11 million users but growing fast. Photo-sharing site Flickr gets 3000 new images uploaded every minute. They’re worth squillions. In theory.

Yet the vast majority of Internet users wouldn’t know what “social networking websites” are — indeed they can barely use email. And for all the success stories, there’s dozens of failures.

So as sharp-dressed Frances Valintine and a relaxed David Wolf-Rooney, both New Zealanders, presented their Vision to a small collection of eminent bloggers (plus me), I couldn’t help but wonder…

Will they become millionaires, or will it all crash and burn?

I also wondered how many times Frances would use the word space. I stopped counting at 15.

I’ll explore iYomu and report daily as it moves from beta to launch and beyond. I think it’ll make an excellent case study. If you’d like to join me and be eligible for the US$5000 prize draw, let me know and I’ll send you an invitation — though I’ll demand that you post at least one useful comment back and, if you win, buy me dinner.

(There’s also a Big Global Incentive to join once the site launches officially, and you’d be in that draw too, but that’s still a secret.)

There’s still one thing bothering me from last night, though. If iYomu is for “grown ups”, why doesn’t it have a grown-up name?

[Update: Check out this more detailed description from one of last night’s attendees. Saves me having to repeat the feature list. And also read my thoughts on why Facebook will beat both iYomyu and MySpace.]

01 August 200701 August 2007

Web 2.0? Try “Enterprise 2.0”!

Following on from recent posts about Web 2.0, I’ve just heard about this article about Enterprise 2.0 — using this “Web 2.0” stuff in business. Lots of diagrams. I haven’t had time to read it properly, but soon, My Pretty Ones!

30 July 2007

Web 2.0: Tsunami or Mirage?

With all the excitement over “Web 2.0”, there’s still an almost complete lack of formal literature. “It is important that movements with such energy and potential be subjected to critical attention,” says Roger Clarke. His working paper Web 2.0 – Tsunami or Mirage? is an interesting start — and he’s presenting a seminar this afternoon at ANU in Canberra.

29 July 200729 July 2007

The Age of the Essay

Will the Internet help the essay make a comeback as an art form? Paul Graham’s essay on this point is almost 3 years old, but I reckon he’s right.

27 July 200729 July 2007

Black is the new black

Further to my post about Blackle and the current wave of fashionable shiny black website design, Janet Hawtin made the observation (in private email) that black is the new black. Well, indeed!

27 July 200727 July 2007

Blackle: a “green computing” furphy

On the surface it sounds great. “A given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen,” says About Blackle. So if everyone turns Google black we’ll save heaps of energy, because it’s such a widely-used website. At least that’s the theory.

And Sydney-based Heap Media is getting attention because they’ve created Blackle (pictured right), a website which provides that black version of Google.

But as always the devil is in the detail…

It’s only old-style CRT monitors which use less energy when displaying darker images. Modern LCD flat-panels use the same power no matter what.
Blackle is a front-end onto Google, serving out the adverts and all. So using Blackie adds to the total power consumption. As well as whatever Google uses, you’re also adding in the overhead of routing your requests via Blackle.
Currently the Blackle home page claims “115,486.374 Watt hours saved”, up from 113,834.304 Watt hours around this time yesterday. That’s not a lot of electricity. 2kWh is enough to run a small server computer for maybe 4 hours — perhaps 6 if it’s not fully loaded. In other words, Blackle uses 4 or 5 times more energy than it saves.

Still, it’s a great way of getting attention for your business under the banner of “saving the planet”, eh? Plus, having a black background means your site can have that oh-so-current style of having everything look like it’s reflected in some shiny black surface.