All your friends in one place?

Have you ever done that thing where you have a party and you invite lots of different friends from different parts of your life (job, university friends, social club), many of who don’t know each other that well, or have perhaps never met?

Sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn’t and, on those occasions when it doesn’t, you think afterwards, “good job that doesn’t happen very often!”

Well, now a similar thing is happening online. With the likes of Facebook, Last.fm, MySpace, Bebo, Virb (I could go on), people have lots of different personas and can be different with different groups of friends. But for some people, this is too much effort and various start-ups are suggesting the idea of having all your social networking buddies in the same place

Are you kidding? Why? I love the fact that people who know my music taste, don’t really know much about Friday Cities and the accompanying community there. As for Facebook – well, almost everyone is on there already.

I also have some friends, who just “don’t do” social media. So they won’t be part of my online life and that’s fine and dandy.

Quit trying to “synergise” everything!

Firefox faces a problem

I love Mozilla Firefox – as a browser, it’s been the acceptable face of anti-Microsoft over the past few years and took over the mantle from Netscape.
In fact, it’s so good that it forced Microsoft to get off their rear end and make Internet Explorer 7, a massive improvement from previous incarnations.

So, it’s some surprise to discover that only 25% of users who download the browser continue to use it.

And now Mozilla faces its biggest test. Can they manage to keep numbers up and keep challenging Microsoft? With all the power that Bill Gates’ organisation has, it’s always been tough for anyone to take on the giant.

Personally, I use anything as long as it’s not Microsoft – and for the very same reason, I adore Macs (OK, the design and coolness helps), because it’s not a PC and doesn’t totally rely on Microsoft products.

The shame of it is, Mozilla is always going to be fighting an uphill battle. My girlfriend, who is an intelligent journalist and not a technophobe, just thinks I’m weird for using it, for no other reason that the name sucks.

Its big plus over IE – tabbed browsing – has now vanished with the introduction of IE7, so it needs to come up with some new ways to increase its market share. Perhaps they need to promote their Facebook group a bit more – it only has 20,000 members at the moment!

The next phase of social networking?

Even though many people have only just got into online social networking, probably via Facebook, web gurus are already looking at the next development.

And, it looks like it could already be here, according to this great post from WebWorkerDaily, who are espousing the potential virtues of new start-up Hikkup, which promotes anonymous networking.