So one day I just logged on to Facebook as usual, and there it was: a bar across the bottom of the page proclaiming the birth of Facebook Chat. A click on a button on it, and up pops a list of all my Facebook friends who are currently online, offering me the opportunity for online chat with them just from another click.

At a time when every online community or system there is seems to be offering a chat facility, I guess it’s hardly surprising that Facebook is following suit.

And in fact I think Facebook is in many ways ideally suited to making the most of chat. One of the main reasons I don’t use chat more often is that I don’t have very many of my friends on other chat systems (maybe this is just me because I don’t really know how to get more on to them), and I think a limited number of friends are indeed on those systems.

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I’ve kept up a bit of running commentary on this blog about the purpose and development of Facebook, and online social networking more generally - and Facebook does indeed still seem to be the place to be, especially for keeping up with distant old friends or contacts.

There have been some intimations of its mortality, however: although it’s been said for some time that there are more Londoners on FB than there are of any other city, this number apparently recently suffered its first monthly fall. And my teenager-with-her-finger-on-the-pulse friend recently declared that she thought Facebook was past its peak.

From its still-burgeoning popularity with everyone from MPs to companies and other organisations, large and small, you might not get this impression - but then the moment when large numbers of such people start getting involved is probably also the moment when some of its core audience start losing interest in it. Having said that, people over 40 who actually use their own profile on FB (rather than have their secretary run it for them) are still relatively rare. I don’t think it’s going to go away - it is simply too useful (and for useful things as well, not only for ’sending’ weird drinks to other people, and ranking which of your acquaintances’ acquaintances are better looking, and other such FB staples), and it remains far easier and nicer to use than any of its competitors - but perhaps it has peaked.

But if Facebook is slowing up, then one networking site which seems to be speeding up at the moment is LinkedIn. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a year now since I first started blogging, so I felt it was more than time to move away from one of the Wordpress standard templates - so here is my new and more customised design! I’d always found the single column of text down the middle of the page, leaving lots of space at the sides of the page, somewhat strange, so I’ve ensured that I now use it all with most of the page used for text, as well as various other new features. Several friends I’ve talked about my blog too have said they struggle to catch up with websites but if you could sign up to receive blogposts by email then they’d do that, and there is now the chance to do that in the sidebar on the right hand side.

I’ve also used the opportunity to link up the design of the blog page with the other pages on the site (and put the whole lot into Wordpress, saying goodbye to my old friend MovableType).

With a little help I’ve come up with a design I’m pleased with and I hope you like it.

A flurry of emails has arrived to tell me that Apple have launched the MacBook Air - the latest incarnation of their supercool laptops (if you are reading this on a computer that is just a black or grey box with sharp corners, and running Windows, then you don’t known what I’m talking about…).

From its publicity, the MacBook Air does indeed look very cool indeed: its main feature is how thin it is (just three-quarters of an inch at its thickest point), but it also looks generally very smooth and sexy, immediately making even the mainstream MacBook look a lot like just a boring box.

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It seemed to be one of those perennial topics last year (not least on this blog!) - what the point of Facebook is.

I get the impression now, however, that there seems to be a consensus growing that one of the things it is most useful for is for maintaining occasional contact with people you don’t see every day but would like to keep vaguely in touch with - which is in fact very similar to some of what I was saying last year.

This came home to me again when I was sending out Christmas cards - something I tend to use for a similar purpose.

And the extent to which it has taken does seem quite extraordinary - and apparently there are now more Londoners on it than people from any other city in the world!

I can see its ongoing appeal, however. One of the things it really seems to get right is its format - and if you doubt that, then just take a look at some of the alternatives, from myspace to bebo to perfspot, to see just how badly the rest of them miss that!

Even though I’ve always been a strong enthusiast for the internet and especially email (someone once told me that everyone had a technological format that is “theirs” - SMS, letters, whatever - and mine is definitely email!), for a long time I avoided accessing the internet from my mobile. I’m not quite sure why - I think probably a vague worry that I’d very quickly run up very large bills.

However a run of particularly boring meetings last summer did the trick, and in one particularly dull one I managed to work out how to rig up the settings to access my email from it.

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Welcome to the blogosphere to my good friend Neil Stockley, who has now started his own blog. Neil is a very keen observer and commentator on (and in the case of the Lib Dems, participant in!) what political parties need to do in order to win - as is very clear already from his first few posts. He seriously knows what he is talking about on political analysis, and his blog definitely goes straight on to my “must read” list!

So here’s the problem: several political discussion sites, like Lib Dem Voice, have a problem with anonymous postings by people who are not in fact who they claim to be. Agents provocateurs from other parties, for example, can and do use either an ‘anonymous’ label or a pseudonym to kick debates off in a particular direction for their own purposes.

Whenever the debate gets particularly bad, a moderator of the site will threaten to reveal the IP addresses of those who have posted - effectively removing their anonymity, by revealing the unique address of the computer which posted the comment. Read the rest of this entry »