Recently we held a vote on our Community Site asking you which websites you visit most often. More than a quarter of you said that Facebook was the site you visited most regularly.
Every day in the PlusNet office somebody will post a “Have you seen this great website?” forum post, a “How cool is this?” message will go around or you’ll see a Twit from a friend claiming that this new site makes the whole Internet as we knew it redundant. I’m sure you’ve been there yourself. Yes, there are a million and one interesting/cool/impressive things floating around on the Internet, but how many of these sites do you personally need?
Do you have particular web-sites and web-tools that are so useful that they have actually become an integral part of your life, or as cool as something may be, is it really just time-wasting flotsam?
Personally, I really couldn’t do without the trusty old HSBC Internet banking website. I know it hasn’t really been upgraded for 6 or 7 years, but who cares? It tells me how much money I have (or otherwise) and I can pay my credit card bill without having to go through the pain of an automated phone system or posting a cheque in the mail.
I find that iGoogle is extremely useful; it aggregates the RSS feeds from all the news sites that I read, and provides me with rudimentary ToDo List functionality and access to all my bookmarks, on whichever of the 3 devices I access the web on.
Apart from that, what else is there that I really need? Yes, Facebook is useful when planning my social life and seeing what my friends are up to, Flickr is useful for sharing my photos with family and friends (and also a useful backup of many years worth of photos), and apart from that, cool does not seem to equal necessary. Twitter, Plaxo and Pownce don’t really do anything for me, do they you?
Google Grand Central may be of use when they open up the service to the UK, but for now I’ll stick with Skype on my laptop and Fring on my phone.
I don’t really watch a lot of TV due to being too busy with other things, so BBC iPlayer isn’t something that I need. I’ll wait for the day when TV stations decide to provide 1 minute summaries of their programming in the style of ZeroPunctuation - much more efficient… 
So, I suppose that all sounds a bit like Mr Grumpy, but if I don’t need something then I’m not going to waste my time on it.
How about you the PlusNet Community Site reader, what web-sites and web-tool do you really rely on as part of your life?
Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet
The BBC are running a story about Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the woman at the centre of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s sex scandal, and how personal information she posted to her MySpace page has been picked up by news agencies worldwide. In it, the author makes several sweeping statements which may be untrue and only serve to confuse the already somewhat complex situation of social network privacy. More…
Have you met someone you want to ‘add’ to your Facebook but don’t want to bother with all the troublesome introductions, words & eye contact? No problem! Simply use your phone to scan the barcode printed on their back! More…
Facebook have recently allowed businesses to have a presence on the site and create their own page. So, we’ve joined in the fun!
Some of you will be 100% familiar and socially immersed in Facebook; the rest of you won’t have a clue what it is. There’s not that many people in between; once it gets you, it’s got you. Once you start updating your status message there really is no going back…
For those who are not familiar, Facebook is a social networking website. It’s the 2nd biggest such site on the web today, surpassed only by MySpace, for now…
It started off life in the US college community in February 2004, and, after various rounds of venture capital funding, has since become available to anyone and everyone.
There’s a comprehensive Wikipedia article on Facebook, here if you want to do some further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
Over the last few months Facebook usage and active accounts has grown exponentially. Many attribute this to them launching an API that allows the community to develop applications to be used on the website. Within weeks, hundreds of user generated applications sprang up (and continue to), including PlusNet’s first (and not last) Facebook application “PlusNet Referrals” written by our very own Dan Dunford.
We also have the PlusNet Staff Facebook Group that, as of writing, 56 staff and alumni are members of, and also the PlusNet Customer Facebook Group where staff and customers can interact on a social basis.
It’s a prime example of the community driving usage and spreading the word. Facebook never advertise the service themselves. Why should they? They have 26 million users who are doing that for them; every day. You can’t buy that sort of exposure.
So, how has this got anything to do with PlusNet? Well, Facebook’s success is down to them providing a service that their users demand. There’s plenty of competition in the social networking sector; Facebook just happen to deliver a product that people want. These satisfied customers then feel confident enough to recommend the service to their circle of friends. Then these friends do likewise to their friends, and before you know it, they have tens of millions of users.
PlusNet operates in exactly the same way in terms of customer acquisition. We need to understand and appreciate the type of service that our customers demand of us and their Internet connection. If we can fulfil these demands then we’ll have some happy customers who will choose to recommend us to their friends and family and colleagues. If we continue to listen to our customers and evolve to suit their ever changing demands, we’ll continue to generate happy, referring customers. If we get things wrong, there’s plenty of other Internet Service Providers out there…
Google and Yahoo are also developing their own Social Network sites. We’ll soon have “Yahoo Mosh” and “Google Socialstream”. You can read more about it on Mike Arrington’s Blog, here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/08/google-yahoo-both-working-on-next-generation-social-networks/
So, Social networking; its here to stay; and let’s face it, it’s always been here. People have always found a way to congregate and form communities since the dawn of man. It just so happens that we have this thing called the Internet that we’re all now umbilically linked to so we can all socialise without getting off our arses…that’s progress for you. It’s the future of PlusNet though…
Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet plc
Here at Plusnet we're always trying to use clever open source things to make our lives easier. Sometimes we write our own and make other people's lives easier too!
We sell broadband, phone, VoIP and more to homes and businesses in the UK. Winner of 9 out of 11 Categories in the 2008 USwitch survey. Winner of "Best Consumer ISP" at 2008 ISPA awards. Voted number 1 in the Broadband Choices 2008 survey.
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