It's an old person's game apparently!

So AOL - Time Warner have bought Bebo in an attempt to get in on the social neworking act. Not THAT much money(£417 million-ish) and I'm sure they know what they are doing! I'm quite sure they have done their sums and know what they are about - with 40 million subscribers there are lots of users out there and time will tell if they have backed the right horse. Will Bebo remain popular with notoriously fickly kids who wouldn't feel they have any particular brand loyalty if something cooler came along...

Anyway, I heard an interesting statistic on BBC Five Live as I was driving home this evening - during an interview with a web analyst bloke from an organisation whose name I forget. He said that there are almost double the number of over 50s online as under 18s. This seemed a remarkable figure, and it certainly took me by surprise! There must definitely be an opportunity for someone to come up with that killer app for the silver surfers out there!

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Social Media and Open Education - getting started...

So, I signed up for a Social Media and Open Education course (EC&I 831) as a non-credit student. The course is being run by Alec Couros from the University of Regina in Saskatchewan (which always makes me think of the Proclaimers song "Cap in Hand"), but that was a several weeks ago. Since then, I have, for various reasons, done nothing... Now, I'm catching up! Easy stuff: Follow all the people from the course who are following me, and follow a few extras. I didn't opt to follow everyone - not sure why not, but I imagine it's because I just felt slightly intimidated by the sheer numbers of them. I'm sure I'll add a few more over the duration of the course as I get to see who's doing what and who has interesting things to say. Mind you, if others use the same criteria, I'm not sure I'll generate many new followers! Sort out Twitterdeck - new Twitter column for course related activity. This should help me to keep track of what people are...

It's been a while...

It's been a while since I last blogged and it's also been a while since I last played cricket. These items are not linked. Cricket season started, for me, on Saturday. We lost, and it was a fairly miserable experience on a ropey ground with even ropier weather. Sign of things to come? Let's hope not. More blogging in the offing? Who knows?

Bing v Google

On the face of it, this battle is still no-contest, however... I came across an interesting item on the RIA Journal blog pointing out that Facebook now uses Bing to power their extended search results and not Google. This possibly goes some way to explain the apparent optimism detected by Rory Cellan-Jones when he recently met with some Microsoft executives . As Rory points out however, Bing has only 3.3% of the market, with Google retaining an impressive 84%. Rory makes the point that he, like many, tried out Bing when it first came out but then reverted back to Google and that Bing’s biggest challenge would be to break down that user inertia. Basically, why bother going to Bing? If Bing can get itself “institutionalised” by becoming embedded in major tools like Facebook then it stands a chance. If it can’t, it will remain insignificant. The big question I have is why did Facebook choose Bing?

Shifting Expectations

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