Is Britain fed up with Facebook?

With roughly half the UK population signed up to Facebook, there is no question that the social networking phenomenon has taken the country by storm. But with reports of a notable decline in user numbers in the UK as well as in the US, it would seem that our fascination is starting to fade. So what is potentially fuelling the decline?

Some people believe that Facebook has simply reached the natural limit of people who want to be engaged with social networking in the UK. Others seem to think that the eagerly anticipated Facebook iPad app will put user numbers back on track when launched. I would suggest that some of the main contributing factors to ‘Facebook fatigue’ could include the following:

• Worthwhile new features need to be added to keep users engaged
• Some people are beginning to reject the notion of giving up their privacy in exchange for non-stop communication
• Social networking can be addictive and waste too much of our time
• Facebook has been spending too much time focusing on developing countries, and neglecting established user bases in the process

Whether it reaches its goal of one billion users, or goes the way of Myspace over the next few years, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for the World’s biggest social networking service. Or will the Chinese buy it first?

In the year 2036….

Last week US publication Network World published an article listing 25 ways in which IT will morph in the next 25 years. This featured notions such as storage becoming cheap enough for you to record every minute of your life and robots outnumbering humans in developed countries.

If the geeks quoted in Network World’s article are right, by the year 2036, all entertainment will be streamed in 3D via your smartphone, making Blu-Ray the last removable media format ever made. Our grandkids will have no idea what a CD or DVD is and on top of this, everything ever created will be available online, making Libraries disappear and books something to be seen in a museum.

This may seem a little extreme to some, but it got us thinking again about how many jobs will be available to the kids of today which don’t even exist yet. When I was in primary school, back in the early nineties, I remember my school buying two ‘Apple Mac’s’ which were subsequently shared between the entire school. I think I got to use one once! Nowadays, with widespread broadband uptake and the ever increasing influence of social media, schools are having to educate children for roles that don’t currently exist.

I.T. has always had its role models in Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the like. However, as far as I am aware, these guys never had blockbuster films made about them. Not to the extent of Mark Zuckerberg anyway, who’s rise to fame was documented in the 2010 hit film ‘The Social Network’.

The meteoric impact of social media has given rise to a whole new generation of computer nerds wanting to be the next Zuckerberg. With this in mind, how long will it be before children are coming home from school and telling their parents that they want to be Content Hyperpersonalisers, Augmented Reality Engineers and Social Media Strategists when they grow up?

April Fools Day on the Web

April Fools Day 2011 was rife with all sorts of clever pranks, from the Metro’s rather obvious edible news papers to stories about recycling schemes for ebooks and even the news that Richard Branson had bought Pluto. And the internet was no place to hide to avoid being hoaxed.

Google itself advertised a job for an ‘autocompleter’ – someone who guesses what people are searching for in Google, and responds in real time to enable its auto complete function. Yeah right! And fans of Ribena on Facebook were largely not fooled by the mock up picture of a new tomato variant posted its official page. Yuk.

The jokers over at Google were also responsible for reverting YouTube’s look and feel to “it’s original design from 1911”. Who knew YouTube had been around decades before the internet itself!? Another pretty obvious April Fools right there, but they even went as far as creating a video of the top viral pictures from 2011.

However, few embraced their inner prankster more than the guys at thinkgeek.com, who added no fewer than eleven fake products to their eshop. These included a pair of ‘De-3D’ glasses which were said to eliminate the 3D effect from 3D movies and packets of green pork scratchings supposedly made from the green pigs from Angry Birds. But our favourite April Fools product from thinkgeek this year was their highly amusing Apple Store playmobil play set, designed to “fuse the fun and sensibility of playmobil with the design cliché and hubris of apple”. Maybe we are a tiny bit biased, what with Playmobil being one of our clients, but feel free to decide which is your favourite fake thinkgeek item.

We loved the accompanying video, a parody of an apple ad promoting the play set, which features a mini Steve Jobs presenting a keynote speech on an iPhone 4 transformed into a miniature plasma screen and a hilarious optional ‘line pack’ which would make kids “wait in line to get that chance to wait in line”. Other quotes such as “we wanted to define the experience of childhood and create a seamless transition to the new realities of adulthood” suggest that the thinkgeek team regard apple’s marketing as a little over the top.

Here’s the video, which has been a trending topic on Twitter and received over 400,000 views and 250 comments on YouTube.