The Evolving Newsroom

Like tens of thousands of others, I got an email this week telling me of the demise of iYomu, a New Zealand-based social network designed to appeal to grown-ups.














Like tens of thousands of others, I took at look at iYomu at the beginning and enjoyed its colourful promotional campaign - a slick series of puzzles created in Flash. The idea was that you solved the puzzles and went into a draw to win $1 million.

But you had to acquire a certain number of points to go in the draw and the puzzles only accounted for so many of them. The rest came from filling out a really involved profile form and signing up lots and lots of friends.

Which was the point at which they lost me.

I had no interest in filling in endless details about myself and I had no intention of signing up friends before I knew whether or not I liked the service or what it had to offer. It felt coercive.

I came back a couple of times to look around but didn't know anyone using the service and didn't feel like I needed to. I already had Facebook, after all, where I knew lots of people, and LinkedIn and Twitter etc.

It seems to me that we join social networks that already have a critical mass of users we already know, or want to know. Once you've joined one or three, most of us don't need or have the time to sign up with more. Opportunities therefore lie not in creating ever more social networks, but in linking and adding value to them - which is what lifestreaming applications like FriendFeed are trying to do.

That said, Richard MacManus argues in his post about iYomu on ReadWriteWeb this week that he still thinks there's room for a niche social network for adults. Something less breathless than Facebook presumably and with a more settled, considered crowd of users.

He's probably right. I don't use much on Facebook apart from messaging and a few applications like Scrabulous (an online adapatation of Scrabble) and Shelfari to track the books I'm reading (but that's offline as much as it's on so I'm looking for an alternative).

But I've yet to come across anything that's sufficiently appealing to encourage not just me but all my friends to move. Not that they're all in one place anyway, I talk to some friends through Facebook, some through Gtalk instant messaging, some through email, text, Skype and Twitter. Occasionally I even pick up the phone.

Age alone isn't enough of a point of differentiation, given, for example, that I have friends ranging in age from 20-80, that it's shared interests, humour and worldviews that attract me to people not their age, and that adults with children want to be on Facebook sometimes precisely because their children are - they want to know what their children's world is like and be part of it.

iYomu had one or two other shortcomings. For a start, I couldn't leave it. I tried but was told the only way to quit was to delete my profile information, but when I tried to do so the form wouldn't save with no information in it, or even with limited information, so I was back to square one. It's not a good idea to trap people.

Then there were the emails that came from time to time advertising $100 spot prizes and $1000 Cash Grabber prizes which expired within 24 hours and so required you to keep coming back to the site. There was something a bit desperate about them.

That said, I'm sorry for the creators, who had what looked like a good idea and gave it a whirl. Let's hope they have better luck with their next venture.

From Hitwise New Zealand come the latest rankings for who's using which social networks in New Zealand:

Rank Name Domain Market Share
1. Bebo www.bebo.com 17.53%
2. Facebook www.facebook.com 15.78%
3. YouTube www.youtube.com 12.56%
4. MySpace www.myspace.com 3.62%
5. SkyKiwi www.skykiwi.com 1.84%
6. 6park.com www.6park.com 1.50%
7. Windows Live Spaces spaces.live.com 1.20%
8. Yeeyi www.yeeyi.com 1.17%
9. Stumble Upon www.stumbleupon.com 1.13%
10. Orkut www.orkut.com 1.12%

Martin Hirst raises some interesting thoughts on how reporters in NZ are plundering Bebo, Facebook and other social network profile pages for quotes and pictures. He talks about the coverage of murdered economics student Sophie Elliott.

"I just wanted here to draw attention to the ways in which Facebook, Bebo etc are now being used extensively as a "source" for reporters. Usually in the context of horrible murders, like the one discussed in the SST article. In the print edition the frontpage splash is illustrated with photos taken from Sophie Elliott's Facebook page, including a photo of her with her alleged killer.

"I wonder did the SST get anyone's permission, presumably Sophie's family, to use this pic, or any pic of her from Facebook? Or is the assumption that because Facebook is 'public', no permission is required, stuff can just be ripped from there without regard to privacy or copyright issues.

"And what about potential contempt of court. A photo of the alleged killer - can this influence potential jurors?"

He goes on to say:

"What about the invasion of privacy? Oh, there is none. Bebo is like a public park. If you stand in the park and have a conversation, and a reporter overhears it, would you expect it to be in the next day's paper?"

I don't know that such coverage is 'extensive' but certainly some journalists seem to see social networks as targets for 'easy' reporting. There are a lot of ethical and privacy issues here, which I'd like to return to another time. But two quick points now: one, lazy reporting does no one any favours; two, every user of social networks needs to set aside 10 minutes to adjust their privacy settings.

The message seems to be getting out that people, especially kids, need to be safety-conscious online. It would help if newspapers would run useful tips and links whenever they run scare stories. That said, I haven't got any links together to include with this post, but I'll try to do so soon. In the meantime, here are a few suggestions from me...

• go to the Privacy tab in whatever network you're using and answer the questions about who you want to be able to see what. If in doubt, choose to have your details visible only to your friends. For example, my Facebook friends can see my profile, groups, friends, pictures, contact details etc; non-friends can only poke me, request my friendship or send me a message, they can't see my profile or my friends.
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• Don't post anything you don't want your boss/father/grandmother/spouse to see. (They're logged on too and if they're one of your friends - or your profile is entirely public - they can see what you got up to over the weekend).
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• Expect potential employers/extended family members/old flames/old school buddies (or enemies) to search for you and check out your profile. Protect your profile or don't post anything you don't want them to see.
  
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• Don't publish your mobile phone number unless you're prepared to change it somewhere down the line if someone gets creepy on you.
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• Don't publish your home phone number or street address.
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• Don't publish your birth date (you have to provide it when you sign up but you can request that it doesn't appear on your profile). This is one less detail lying around for fraudsters.
  
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• Job done. Now hang out with your friends and have fun.

I'd be glad to hear other thoughts on how to keep safe online. You can leave a comment here or email me at juliestarr@offshoreeditorial.com.

Hitwise reports that Bebo remains the most popular social networking site in NZ, with 16.87% market share for the week ending 5 January 2008. Facebook followed closely at second position with 14.2% share. Bebo has strong brand recognition, Hitwise said, and was the leading search term for 2007.

The report says people spend considerably more time on social networking sites than they do on other websites.

"Bebo had an average session duration of 26 minutes and 22 seconds for the week ending 5 January 2008, compared to websites across all categories, which had an an All Categories average of 11 minutes and 8 seconds. The average session time by New Zealand internet users on Facebook was 17 minutes, 54 seconds and on MySpace it was 13 minutes and 54 seconds."

After logging out from Bebo and Facebook, most users then head for "News & Media, Shopping & Classifieds, Multimedia, Games, Photography, Education and Sports."