Online plans for the summer

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: May 15th, 2010 | 0 Comments

After next week, all my exams will be finished. For this summer, I have a few things online that I want to get done. The first is to get a website completed for a client, I have been working on this site on and off over the last while and I really should have completed it by now, however things always come up such as these exams and also content I needed for the site wasn't available at the time. Now however I can get the content for the site and I will get it finished. The week after my exams (Monday week, May 24th) I intend to begin this work. I should have it completed within two days, there is not a whole lot of work to be done on it, it's just as I said, finding the time to get it done. The next thing I want to get done is my new layout for this blog, I meant to get a new design up for April but just didn't get the time to do it. So I just made a few changes this month until I got the time to sort out a new design. I have been looking at different designs that I could work with to suit what I want, and now it is just a matter of picking the right one and making a few changes to make it my own ;). The next thing I want to do is a sort of small project, it is an idea I came up with a while ago and it will be semi community based and I hope to get it completed by the end of the summer. This small project is also targeted for the Irish market as I haven't seen it done here yet. I will say more on this project once I get it started. I also want to create a new design for my website I bought a while ago, it is one I am proud to of managed to get, SeanLucas.com is a domain I will always hold on to and I think it would benefit much more from getting a new design. I also have a little bit of competition in terms of Google Results for my name that I would like to beat :D! The final thing I want to get done this summer is a more long term project, this too revolves around a community of people, like a social network, but will require a lot of work to get completed so I don't expect it to be completed by this summer or even by the end of the year! For this project, I don't intend on saying much about it until I am happy with the way it is working out. This is more of a silent project of my own :). So these are the main things that I want to get done throughout the summer, there will probably be a few other things that I will do whenever I have some spare time, but this list is fine for now.

Bebo, will it shut down?

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: April 7th, 2010 | 1 Comments

AOL are now beginning to see that the investment they made into the social network, Bebo, was a big mistake. So much now that they are either going to shut the site down or look for a new buyer, but it will be unlikely that they will make a profit if they sell it.

Two years ago AOL bought Bebo for 850 million dollars! A lot of money, but back then Bebo was the number one social network in Ireland and the UK. Since then though it seems like Bebo remained pretty static, not a lot changed and it soon became more of a social network for young teens. Having such a younger audience does not always appeal to advertisers because they are less likely to make money from their advertisements.

Other social networks such as Facebook suddenly took over in the past year and with a lot of people signing up to use Facebook they just lost interest in Bebo.

I don't use Bebo anymore, I might log in once every so often but I do not actually use it for talking to friends. Here is a little graph of recent stats for various social networking sites, you can see the decline in Bebo over the past year, almost a 50% drop in unique visits!

I do think that it would be unfortunate to see bebo close, i think that with the right owner it could be turned around but it would require a lot of work. It should be more slimmed down, the content is just too bulky on the site, all other sites seem to be going with the trend of slimming down there sites. Facebook has a nice plain and simple look to it and so too does YouTube, with it's recent upgrade of it's video page it is even more simplistic!

There is however always new and better services coming out and if the current sites do not keep with the times then they are bound to fizzle out like Bebo, when Twitter was launched, Facebook brought out a new, what's on your mind feature, which is the same as what twitter has, by adding this feature Facebook managed to keep their members. Bebo did bring out a new feature like this but it was too late and also it didnt incorporate into the site as well as it did with Facebook.

For Bebo to add that feature they had to make a new "Home" section to their site where you could see recent changes and the new status changes of users (the twitter-like feature).

For now Bebo is still here, by the end of next month (May 2010) we will see if it will close down or be sold as that is when the company's strategic evaluation will end.

Facebook Usernames

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: June 14th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Last Friday, June 12th, Facebook launched a new way of allowing there users to share links to their pages that would be easier to remember, in the form of a username. The launch in Ireland would have been at 5am GMT so I decided I was not that eager to get a username so I decided not to stay up :D

However the next day I got up and tried to get my name as my username but I couldn't so I settled for leateds! so instead of having a easily long url to give out to people so they can find my page, usually people will end up misspelling url's that are long, now all they have to do is go to a really short url: www.facebook.com/leateds , its much simpler.

So the idea of being able to finally get a username seemed a big hit with everyone on facebook, so within the first 3 minutes of facebook beginning to issue username, over 200,000 were registered, that is just mental :o.

And then when the first hour of username registration passed over a 1,000,000 had been issued! The biggest worry that facebook engineers had was how they were going to prevent there site from crashing with the most likely sudden burst of visitor traffic, so they made a lot of modifications on ways they can improve the quality of the site and reduce server load requests. And they ended up being successful because there site did not go down, which is amazing considering the amount of traffic they received.

Here are some more figures (from mashable) on username registration on the launch of username registration:

- It took 3 minutes to reach 200,000 usernames registered. That’s an astounding 1111+ registered per second during the first minutes of the feature release.

- After 15 minutes, the number of usernames jumped to 500,000. The pace slowed down, but there is no laughing at 555.5 usernames or so taken per second. How many other websites could handle that type of load?

- By 10:01 PM PT, a full hour after release, around one million custom URLs had been claimed. That’s an average of 278 usernames per minute or so.

- Where do Facebook usernames stand now? Well, as of 2:00 PM ET/11:00 AM PT, over 3 million usernames have been taken. That’s 3,000,000 custom URLs during a Friday night.

So basically a lot of usernames have been registered since the launch. I wonder why facebook waited this long to release usernames, most social networks had them from when they started out, and considering that facebook is one of the biggest sites in the world, you would think they would of had usernames by now! Anyway for more info on username registration, check out the blog post over on mashable.com

You can get yourself a username by going here, before they are all gone ;), well not all of them, but all the good ones!