chris dalrymple - blog

Well actually, it doesn't. It just records all the stupid things you do. Interesting article from the BBC about the perils of online paper trails, especially if you're just about to enter the big wide world of employment.

The inability to delete your emo-tastic MySpace profile aside (ever heard of privacy settings?), it's definitely something people should think more about - especially if you've spent your formative years as an online AOL 12 Y3AR OLD SCRIPT KIDEI LOLZ!.

On a few occasions before meetings or job interviews people have asked me about my blog (hello if you're doing pre-meeting research). Because of this I'm very aware of what I write which might incriminate me later, but to a certain extent I just have to live with it - I'm sure any determined Googler could find something untoward if they looked hard enough.

However so long as you're sensible with your privacy settings, use an alias if you want to spill salacious gossip about your colleagues on a public message board and be careful who tags photos of you dressed like a fairy on facebook, you should be fine.

Labels: bbc, facebook, google, myspace, privacy

What MySpace does ok, Facebook does better. What Twitter does ok, Jaiku does better (and even Facbook does ok).

I think the biggest problem a lot of new web ventures are having (or are going to have), is that there's a huge overlap between rival platforms: Whereas previously technologies like Blogger, Wordpress, Movable Type etc all did much the same thing (just with different levels of success), there was little need for each platform to talk to each other - it was all just published on the web for everyone to see.

Now though everything's about networks and communities, but with a focus on communities within specific platforms - My Myspace account can't talk to my Facebook account. If I have a twitter account I still have to incessantly tell Jaiku and Facebook What I'm Doing.

This is all exacerbated by the proliferation of new apps which do the same as the old one, but a little bit better. As soon as you've got to grips with one cool new toy, it's replaced by another.

Until these platforms open up a little more (and sure, Facebook is welcoming new developers, but with fairly strict Ts and Cs) then they can only have a limited lifespan. If startups want to be around for the long haul, they need to open up properly, to talk to each other easily.

Either that, or the Next Big Thing will be a site which pulls every kind of social app you could use together, easily, in one place. Bloglines for the myspace generation if you like.

Labels: facebook, jaiku, myspace, twitter, web 2.0