Saturday 1 October 2011

Social Networking, The Internet & You

I stumbled across this old half written post, and thought it was too good not to share. With the likes of diaspora also coming out since I wrote it, things just keep getting worse eh?


This week we've all said a huge "Hello" to Google Plus. Web developers worldwide getting hounded by their manages to quickly add in some +1 buttons to their websites. Will it take off? Will it join the dumpster with myspace? Or will it just linger around and be yet another thing for us to check daily to make sure we haven't missed something.

It would seem every time a new social network comes out, us programmers are being forced to add share buttons all over our sites. Check the bottom of this blog post for example and there will be 10 or so icons to share it on various networks. We just keep adding and adding, with the theory being if we miss one, we miss a whole heap of sharing and traffic opportunity.

There seems to be mixed emotions about where it's going. Tech savvy people are all over it like fingerprints on an ipad. But what percentage of those are because they have to, for work purposes or whatever? Non-tech savvy people just can't be bothered moving all their photos over from facebook to G+, re-friending everyone, learning all the new privacy settings etc etc.