Website Hype

You have probably never heard of the website known as 80’s Music Lyrics, but it’s well worth taking a peek – especially if you are an aficionado of eighties music, games and culture.

Here you can find details of bands such as Midnight Oil, the Steve Miller Band, Simple Minds, Electric Light Orchestra and Queen, as well as articles about performers such as Cyndi Lauper, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel and Madonna.

There is a forum where you can discuss all things eighties, including games, toys, fashions, books, TV programmes and movies. Needles to say there is plenty of discussion of eighties music, and also those memorable eighties music videos.

The site has plenty of quizzes and humour, but perhaps the piece de resistance, and the thing that brings many people to the site, is their great collection of classic eighties arcade games. Here you can play Pacman, (I love that one), Simon, with its great beeping sounds, the unforgettable Space Invaders, that was de rigeur in every English pub in the eighties. There is also Asteroids, but I enjoyed the pub machine version rather than this one – I can’t play it as well using a keyboard, nevertheless, it does bring back great memories of London pub life. There is also one of the earliest electronic games of all, Pong, although we just knew it as “Tennis”, where two players knock a “ball” back and forth – I think some pubs had specialised tables for this game.

So, if you need a bit of eighties nostalgia, or just a few fun games from days of yore to try, get yourself over to Eighties Music Lyrics.

Heard the latest? Rumour has it that Facebook has made an offer of $85 million to buy Zhanzuo.com, which is China’s largest social networking site. And it’s no surprise that Facebook is after a piece of the action in ever fast growing China, where the economy has been booming for some considerable time, and demand for modern goods and services continues apace.

According to the China Internet Network Information Center, there are some 162 million internet users in China, a figure which has grown by around 140 million users in the past seven years, despite some efforts on the part of the government to restrict or control use of the internet. And it seems that the current trend for social networking online, which has taken off exponentially in recent years, is by no means confined to the West, as around seven million Chinese internet users are on Zhanzuo.com.

It seems that the news of the $85 million offer has come from The Times, (that’s the UK Times), and now the word is out all over the web. The Times also reports that Zhanzuo.com CEO Jack Zhang, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, have had talks, but that no deal has actually been completed. It is intriguing that Facebook is denying all these reports.

So what will come of this? It will be interesting to see if Facebook eventually do acquire Zhanzuo.com, and how this might alter the site. The acquisition, if it does go ahead, will certainly give Facebook’s already strong international credentials an added dimension.

Quite often it is the non-commercial enterprises that become the really innovative and exciting websites, and the urban75 e-zine has become one of the most popular e-zines on the web, with games, photos, an events diary, information, articles, reports, but most of all, its piece de resistance – its bulletin boards, where its aficionados simply refer to it as “urban”.

Founded in 1995 in Brixton, England, (for those of you that don’t know, Brixton is part of London, south of the River Thames), the site remains resolutely unmonetised, being strictly non-profit, with no banners, no tie-ins, and no ads. The photos are a real treat – there are galleries depicting Brixton, London, New York, Chicago, Brighton, and Wales, as well as various 360º panoramas and even photography tutorials!

The site features loads of just-for-fun games, made by various web designers, and it is made abundantly clear that many of the games are pointless and have no meaning, such as “The Dot Clicking Game” and “The Curious Thingy” – a bit like “Mornington Crescent”.

Football regularly features on the site, but you certainly don’t need to be a footie fan to enjoy it. (For those of you across the Pond, I’m talking about soccer).

The bulletin boards have grown into a highly popular community, with around 33,000 registered members, although only a fraction of these are active posters. At present, there are an impressive quarter of a million page impressions each day, and about 5,000 new posts daily.

Yours truly has been contributing much of late, due to a bit of software development work. The advice you get there is great – as well as sorting out my programming problem, I have received advice about gardening, seen photos of people’s pets, discussed food, pubs, music, had a laugh and a joke. The boards are managed by a team of sensible moderators, so things don’t get out of hand, and despite being London based, the forum has a very international dimension. Urban definitely has its own inimitable sense of humour and its own culture, and if that’s not enough, there are offline nights in London where you can meet other urbanites.

The World Wide Web has become so ubiquitous, that it is now almost easy to forget where it came from. There was a time when the internet and email were simply the tools of university geeks, and their mass use, despite the increase in use of personal computers, was still rather unheard of. But then along came Tim Berners-Lee, an English developer who, with Robert Cailliau, created the World Wide Web.

It comes as rather a surprise to many that the World Wide Web was actually invented at CERN, which is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, based in Geneva, and which in 2008 will be switching on its Large Hadron Collider, which will hopefully reveal to us some great things about how the universe is put together.

While Berners-Lee was an independent contractor at CERN in 1980, he proposed a project based upon hypertext, that would facilitate the sharing and updating of information among scientists. So, to this end, he built a prototype system named Enquire, and by 1989 CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe. Berners-Lee had the idea of joining hypertext with the Internet, using similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system, to create the World Wide Web and the first Web site was created at CERN, and put online in 1991.

The very first website provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how one could own a browser and how to set up a web server. As other websites started to spring up, it also became the world’s first web directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other websites apart from his own. Pretty soon websites started to spring up on topics of general interest to everybody, and email became increasingly common.

Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due, and the World Wide Web Consortium decided that their standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone.

So there we have it – the rest is history, and the technology is now taken for granted by just about everybody.

Berners-Lee is now the director of the World Wide Web Consortium which oversees the continued development of the web.

There’s nothing like the internet for getting people together, and there’s nothing like football for bringing people together either. Combine the two, and you’ve got MyFootballClub.co.uk, which was launched earlier this year, with the main intention of getting enough football fans signed up, at a cost of £35 each, to buy an English football club. (By the way, for those of you across the Pond, I’m talking about soccer). Thus far, around 50,000 members have paid up, (thirty five quid is about $72), and this has created a fund of about 1.3 million pounds. The site has happily announced that a deal has been agreed with Ebbsfleet United, a minor English football club, for US$1.45 million. The membership will own the club, vote on team selection, decide which players to buy and sell and, hopefully, guide the club up the leagues.

This great new venture has been set up by none other than former football journalist Will Brooks, and it is probably the first time in football history that fans have had the opportunity to buy and take control of a professional football club – both on and off the pitch. Every MyFootballClub member is going to have an equal say in team selection, player transfers and the running of the club, with decisions being made via an online private forum and voting system.

The new site highlights the fact that the internet opens up the possibility of organisations being democratically run by large numbers of members in a way that would not have been possible previously, allowing daily contact between people living miles apart, indeed scattered all over the globe. Online forums allow everyone to have their say, and website software allows large numbers of people to vote easily on crucial issues, and for those votes to be quickly counted.

So it will be interesting to see how well this idea works, and the outcome of this particular venture could point the way to future online enterprises dealing not just with football, but a myriad of possibilities in terms of co-operative company ownership, and online democratic decision making.

The Student Room is the indispensable forum for UK students, particularly for those doing A levels, and considering university. Here you can get frank advice about what the different university courses are like, which subjects are interesting to study, which A levels you need to study a particular subject, and so on. You can compare notes with others about how open days and interviews went, what offers have been made by the departments, ask questions about student finance, and generally find out just about everything you need to know. Present students can tell would-be students the inside information about the different halls of residence at a university, the quality of the nightlife in a particular city, and a thousand and one other cool bits of information. You can also discuss student related issues such as gap years, your love life, politics, and, well, just about any subject. The Student Room is especially useful round about exam time, as people can rant about the difficulty of the questions, and compare how they did.

Originally created in 2001 as a portal site, with a vBulletin based discussion forum running alongside, by 2002 the portal idea was dropped and the focus of the site became the forum itself. The site offers more than just the forum however, one section of the site offers members free advice about their personal statement, which forms an essential part of the UK university application.

For paying members, there is yet more – they have access to around two hundred arcade games and competition league tables, as well as a secret sub-forum.

The site also offers TSR Wiki, which includes revision notes covering many subjects from GCSE level right up to University level.

The site is owned by Acumen Professional Intelligence Ltd, and on 19 September 2007 the new look website was launched – it was out with the standard vBulletin layout, and in with a custom-made skin. The new look site is sleek and professional, and with over a 140,000 members to click those ads for universities, mobile phone companies, and all things of interest to discerning young people, The Student Room looks well set for success.

While we wonder if Facebook will join OpenSocial, it seems that Facebook has other things on its plate. Next week Facebook will be launching its Social Ads advertising service, which takes the Facebook ads outside the social network, and allows third party sites to run them. Interesting. It’s Facebook’s very own version of Google Adsense, and will take Facebook and Google into an even more competitive position vis-a-vis one another.

The whole thing will not actually be unveiled until November 6th, but it looks like it will work in a similar way to AdSense, but the ads will be targeted to Facebook members profile data, and interests. This will be done, surprise, surprise, via cookies which will identify the members later when they visit other sites hosting Social Ads.

Facebook has already had a go at targeting ads on its own site, by means of its Facebook Flyers program, using demographic and psychographic data gleaned from members’ profiles. With Social Ads, that targeting will be extended right across the web.

The only glitch in all of this is that the targeting will only work for Facebook members, who are still not a major proportion of all web users, despite the fact that Facebook has grown so dramatically in membership.

There is also some talk that Facebook will be targeting ads according to who networks with who on the site, but this remains to be seen. Meanwhile industry pundits are waiting for November 6th to see what lies in store on the Facebook scene.

OpenSocial seems to be the word, (or is it words?), on everyone’s lips at the moment. And in case you don’t know what that is, it’s a set of common application programming interfaces (API’s) for web-based social network applications, that has been developed by Google, and was released today, November 1, 2007. So what does this mean? Applications implementing the OpenSocial API’s will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them, including features on sites such as MySpace and Friendster.

OpenSocial provides as a more open cross-platform alternative to the Facebook Platform, and was initially seen as a potential challenge to the big social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook. However it now seems that MySpace has joined OpenSocial as a partner. Chris De Wolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace, says, “this is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network.” Now everyone is waiting for the reaction of Facebook, whose platform has received some criticism for not being open enough.

The whole project will tie together Google, MySpace and numerous other social networking platforms in a common environment that application publishers can publish widgets to with one set of code.

Since the release of OpenSocial, it has apparently already been hacked. Somebody going under the handle of theharmonyguy, and claiming to be a mere amateur, has already compromised the RockYou OpenSocial application on Plaxo called emote, having added a number of emoticons to Plaxo VP Marketing John McCrea’s profile within 45 minutes of it launching.