I’m sure my attention span is getting shorter. Any film that clocks in at over 90 minutes (or, heaven forbid, longer than 120 minutes) will start to try my patience, and I’m only willing to give new TV shows a couple of episodes to prove themselves before I’ll move on to something else. The whole “instant gratification generation” thing definitely applies to me. So Joss Whedon’s newest project - an online series entitled Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog - couldn’t be more perfect. There are only three episodes, and the first one, which went live today, clocks in at under 14 minutes.

Starring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion, Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is pretty much what the title suggests - the musical adventures of a would-be supervillain. Er, so why am I writing about this on an IT-related blog? Well, it’s interesting because of the method of distribution. Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog owes its existence to the Writers Guild of America strike; Whedon decided to produce something completely independently of the studios, and distribute it over the Internet himself. But unlike, say, LonelyGirl15, Whedon has a plan for turning Dr Horrible into a legitimate commercial entity - the three episodes will be published over the course of this week, and will stay available until July 20th. Then they’ll be removed from the free site, but you’ll be able to pay to download the episodes from iTunes, and a DVD containing all the episodes plus extras will be available shortly too. The Dr Horrible website seems to be suggesting that there’s merchandise on the way, too, and there’s a Captain Hammer tie-in comic available through Dark Horse.

Obviously, the difference between Whedon’s project and other Internet dramas like LonelyGirl15 is that Whedon has already been around the block - he’s worked in TV and film, he knows how that works, and with Firefly, he knows what the power of a loyal fanbase can do. So it’s not surprising that this seems to be a much more professional enterprise. But it’s maybe the first indication that the Internet might become a really and truly viable distribution method for entertainment in the future, and that’s really exciting.

(Doesn’t hurt that Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is also really, really good, of course.)

I was all set to write a blog post this morning… and then, in the course of my catching up with the Internet, noticed that Mike Skuse had pretty much done it for me. Actually, I’ve written about something similar before too, but I’m going to add another post to the pile anyway. Last week, I took some time off work - and banned myself from my laptop as well. I set up away messages on Facebook, in my Gmail account and in my work e-mail account, letting people know that if they needed me, they could call my mobile but that I wouldn’t be checking any online messages at all. Then I powered down my laptop, closed the lid, and left it alone.

I did consider locking it in the back of my wardrobe or something, just to put the temptation well and truly away, but didn’t bother in the end. Which is probably why I ended up cheating a couple of times.

Monday felt really odd. Usually, getting up and eating breakfast sitting at my desk is part of my morning routine, but Internet access was banned, so instead of switching on the computer I switched on the TV and watched the news. I had planned to walk into town or do some exploring (shamefully, since I moved house in March I really haven’t explored enough of the local countryside) but the weather had other ideas, so I spent most of Monday curled up on my sofa reading a book with obnoxious pop music playing in the background and rain battering against the windows. Which isn’t all that far away from my idea of the perfect day, actually.

By Tuesday, I’d more or less acquired the knack of not sitting at a computer all day, and since the sun was shining I went out and explored. Wednesday was another rainy day, but I was better prepared this time and spent the day baking cupcakes, and on Thursday… well, I did some backsliding. My boyfriend called from Euston to say that all the trains were cancelled, and I wanted to find an alternate way for him to get home, which naturally meant hopping onto Google. I’m not proud - but how on Earth did people cope before there was Google, anyway?

While I was online, I took the opportunity to clear the 500-odd post backlog on my RSS reader, and to read/delete the 50 e-mails sitting in my inbox. I spent about an hour on the computer before forcibly prying myself away and moving into the kitchen to cook, and then settling down with a book again.

Friday and the weekend were mostly taken up with social engagements, but I did let myself back on the computer to reply to e-mails and to clear my RSS feed again (er, and to look up a recipe. Oops). I didn’t check my work e-mail addresses, though, so this morning has involved yet more ploughing through - it’s odd, because I generally deal with e-mail as and when I recieve it, to see a week’s worth of mail all piled up like that. I use the Internet for absolutely bloody everything, from planning travel arrangements to keeping in touch with friends to planning shopping trips and finding recipes and playing games and generally keeping myself entertained and up to date with the world, and I’m not entirely sure that I even accomplished much in my week away from the ‘net, apart from lots and lots of cooking and ploughing through three novels, but somehow, it felt good to cut the strings for a little while, to liberate myself from the constantly-in-touch world and just … relax.

Still, it’s 11:24 right now and time for a nice big coffee, I think. Lots to do, lots to do…

Never one to drop a story before I’ve completely chewed the life out of it, I went to check on the Faceparty situation, and found a message from the administrator in my account. After some blather about a new webcam service, it says this:

“There have been rumours and press stories saying we are deleting everyone over 36. This is not true (as you should notice by browsing and seeing people over 36). Nobody has been deleted because of their age, but we have deleted 7 million accounts for hundreds of different reasons… most importantly to get all the spammers, fakers etc out. Our plan has been working really well, and we’ll soon be opening our doors again to those who got deleted by unavoidable accident.

If any of your friends were deleted by accident, you can apply to have them re-instated in the Gossip section, under the thread “Friend Deleted?”.

All for now,

*hugs*

Admin x”

While it’s true that there do still appear to be lots and lots of members over 36 on the site, that’s really not what Faceparty announced about its policies. Is this some rapid backtracking, then?

I’ve written in the past about the impossible demands people have been making of social networking sites, forcing them to somehow make sure that sex offenders and paedophiles can’t contact children on them, and I’ve always said I wasn’t sure how anyone could ever expect to enforce something like that.

Well, it looks like Faceparty has found a way:

In the last 2 months, Faceparty has been deleting a lot of profiles from the website. This has been due either to new legal requirements, violations of our terms of service, the non purchase of your account by the new company who is running Faceparty.com, or any of the following reasons. Information on refunds is also on this page. Please read this page in its entirety.

Over 36 years old?

New government legislation means we need to check older users on the sex offenders list. This legislation is based upon checking email addresses against a government provided list. Faceparty has never insisted on validated email addresses and can therefore not participate in this new scheme. Having discussed the use of our website with the home office and the police, and further some pretty serious crimes caused by older users, we were left with no option but to terminate a huge amount of accounts, and without notice, immediately. We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which - we can only delete all to make the site safe and we apologise for that. However, we are following the law and you cannot think we are wrong for doing that.

Um. Well, I think some people would think they’re wrong for doing that. This part of Faceparty’s announcement is interesting, too:

Unfortunately some of the creators of accounts who were deleted, of an older age group, have been creating new accounts with a younger age (which means that government legislation classifies them as a sex offender by lying about their age on the Internet, even though most who have done this may have done so with good intent and purely to be a part of a site they love and without any intent to manipulate younger users)

Really? Is that actually the law? Anyone know?

I’m baffled. Read their whole justification here.

So, Facebook has added a chat function to its social networking site. It’s currently being rolled out across the site’s thousands of users, but will eventually be available to everyone, displaying in a bar at the bottom of the page and allowing users to talk to their friends in real time, rather than via messages or wall posts.

MySpace has had a similar service for donkey’s, and Gmail’s chat function will let your AOL or Gmail contacts talk to you in real time, too. (And anyone you e-mail at a Gmail address automatically gets added to your contact list, aggravatingly, so if you don’t want someone to know you’re online and be able to contact you, you’ll have to take ‘em back off.)

While I’m not being forced to use Facebook Chat, obviously, and I can choose to be signed out/invisible on all of these services, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. It’s possible that I’m mildly OCD - I really hate having multiple programs hanging around that essentially serve the same purpose, and I already use MSN Messenger. I guess I just don’t see the point, and am frustrated with having to always turn things off, instead of on. Facebook is enough of a pestering-machine as it is, what with the constant stream of application invitations and the “poke” function; adding a chat function is overkill.

What’s the point of using a social networking site to IM, anyway? The two are different and, in my opinion anyway, should be kept separate.

The fun never ends when you’re me. Having finally moved house and almost completely unpacked, I came down with some kind of space virus - and, of course, having only just moved to my new flat, I hadn’t managed to register with a doctor yet. Luckily, my wireless connection had been set up, so I could use my Google-fu to track down the nearest doctor’s surgery to my house. (What Google Maps didn’t tell me, sadly, was that the nearest surgery was at the top of a hill. My symptoms included being tired all the time, being short of breath, and having a nasty, burning cough. A 0.65 mile walk up a hill was not what I most wanted in the world on Friday morning, I have to say!)

Skipping over various amounts of hilarious slapstick comedy involving bureaucracy and my inability to memorise maps correctly: I finally got registered with a doctor yesterday. And was diagnosed with laryngitis. Since there aren’t any drugs for this, I’ve basically got to inhale steam with a towel over my head, drink lots of water, rest, and … not talk.

That last part is killing me. See, I can talk - my voice is all crackly and occasionally drops three octaves or comes out in an unexpected whisper, but I can move my lips and tongue and make sound come out more or less normally, and more or less intelligibly. But I’m not supposed to. The alternatives I’ve tried so far involve the following:

- Sending messages on Facebook
- Sending e-mails (occasionally to my boyfriend, while he’s in the room)
- Writing on bits of paper
- Inventing my own sign language

However! I’ve just discovered this, a demo version of IBM’s Websphere Voice text-to-speech software. I can type almost as fast as I can speak, so, assuming I don’t want to move from my desk chair for the next couple of days, this might be the winner.

Or I’ll probably just give up and talk, because I clearly can’t be trusted with anything like my own health. Pfft.

(On the bright side, my new doctor has an online way to book appointments and request repeat prescriptions. Why don’t all doctors have this? That’s brilliant!)

So, according to Nielson Netratings, Facebook’s domination of the Internet might be on the slide. Between December 2007 and January 2008, there was a 5% fall in visitor numbers - MySpace and Bebo have suffered similar drops in traffic. Could this be the beginning of the end?

Well, maybe. Then again, maybe not.

The sensible explanation here would seem to be that most websites suffer a drop in traffic over Christmas, particularly ones that people access from work. Because at Christmas, people have more interesting things to do. Another factor is almost certainly the fact that many offices have blocked access to social networking sites, so employees can’t access these sites during working hours. That’ll kill a lot of traffic to time-wasting websites. And the thing with websites like Facebook is that if you can’t access it regularly, there’s not an awful lot of point: the fun of it is watching things change, reading your friends’ status updates in real time, and writing messages on their walls about them. If you don’t check it for a few days, you’ll probably find that when you do come back, there’s not a lot to catch up on - conversations you might have had now won’t happen, because the moment’s passed. A lot of concerns have been raised recently about whether or not people should share any information online at all, due to fears of identity theft, and that, too, might have negatively affected Facebook’s traffic.

But I don’t think that MySpace, Facebook et al are going to be shutting up shop any time soon. It was probably naive to think that the all-consuming popularity of social networking was going to continue forever, because the zeitgeist almost moves on, often for no discernible reason. Dozens of social networking sites have already fallen by the wayside - who uses Friendster any more, or even, if we’re honest, MySpace? Something else will, almost inevitably, rise up to take the place of Facebook:

Confession time: I intended to write at least one blog entry over the Christmas holidays. But I couldn’t, because I left the e-mail containing my password in a work account, and since I was at home, er, that wasn’t particularly useful.

What I was going to write about, though, was the exciting news that Facebook has removed the word “is” from its status update box. (Which is now hopelessly out of date, but I’ll plough on regardless.) For the whole two people remaining in the world who don’t use Facebook, I should explain: Facebook allows you to enter a sentence about what you’re doing, thinking or feeling at any gi ven time, so all your friends can read it - kind of like Twitter, on a slightly smaller scale. And until very recently, that update box provided you with the beginning of a sentence - [Your name] is…

Now, though, the ‘is’ has been made optional, rather than compulsory. Now, your status update can incorporate whatever verb you like, without you having to come up with some grammatically torturous way of doing so. I can make my status read “Sarah Dobbs likes Christmas”, rather than, er, “Sarah Dobbs is liking Christmas”, or whatever nonsense I might have come up with, were I feeling particularly incapable of sentencing properly.*

If you’re a Facebook user, there were two appropriate reactions, upon hearing this news. One was “cool!” The other, “meh, whatever.” Bafflingly, though, some contrary types immediately set up a Facebook group demanding the return of the ‘is.’

I know Facebook groups are largely pointless and don’t serve any function other than to kill time, but - seriously? Does not compute.

* No-one reading this will get that reference. It’s obscure, but worth it.

Considering I’ve written two blog entries here about the right royal mess LonelyGirl15’s creators made of trying to make a living off a web-based drama series, it seems only fair to comment about how well they seem to be doing with Kate Modern.

The difference between the two series is striking, actually. LonelyGirl15 started off small, with little fanfare, making the news when someone worked out Bree wasn’t a real person, and then pootling along quite happily without making much money for a while - eventually, merchandise went on sale, advertising was added, and a few deals were struck concerning product placement and online partnerships. Just before season 1 came to an end, LG15 finally came up with something to offer their advertisers that no-one else could: a sponsored character. Spencer Gilman, a new friend for the LonelyGirl15 characters, was sponsored by Neutrogena; his character was a scientist who worked for the company. Nice.

Kate Modern, by contrast, started off with an exclusive Bebo deal, meaning the videos are hosted there before they show up anywhere else. Using a social networking site has also meant that the characters can interact even more fully with their fans - a pretty clever move. Whereas none of the actors in LonelyGirl15 were recognisable, Kate Modern co-stars Ralf Little, of The Royle Family fame. And as a result of that, it’s been featured on Richard and Judy, plus, yesterday, in thelondonpaper. Product placement deals have also already been sorted out, and the Kate Modern site, associated with the LG15 site, was launched complete with its own ready-made forums.

It also looks to be a much more grown-up and slicker production. Is this the future of television? Meh, probably not, but it’s quite fun anyway.

Meanwhile, out there in the big bad world of Web 2.0, various advertisers have gotten their knickers in a twist and pulled advertising from Facebook - because their adverts might have been shown alongside a profile for the BNP.

My own personal political beliefs aside, this is royally stupid. If you sign up to advertise on a site with user generated content, you need to sacrifice a certain measure of control. That’s just the way it works. And most users of such sites know the deal, too; they know the advertising is rolled out across the entire site and can’t be controlled by the advertisers,. There’s no reason to assume that advertisers support particular political parties, any more than there is reason to believe they want to associate themselves with any group or individual with a profile on that site.

Facebook is already facing multiple lawsuits from people who believe their patents have been infringed, so this just seems like a further slap in the face for the still-beloved social networking site. We can only hope some of their advertisers will see sense.

I’ve spent much of this week signing up for social networking sites. Primarily to write an article about them, I admit, but also out of curiosity. I keep getting invited to various ones, or getting notification e-mails that someone’s tried to add me as a friend on some site I don’t belong to, and I always mean to check them out, but never quite get round to it…

In short, the only thing I’ve learned this week is that people might use multiple sites, but the one they really rely on is MySpace. Messy, buggy, and constantly down for some kind of maintenance or other, MySpace is still king of the castle when it comes to networking - socially or otherwise.

Because some of the ’social’ bit’s gone out of it now, hasn’t it? Maybe it’s the Murdoch influence, or maybe it’s just rampant cynicism, but … who uses MySpace to make friends any more? Maybe teenagers. Everyone else is there to try to elbow themselves forward in their careers; to make connections that they otherwise might not be able to. And since MySpace is where everyone else is, it’s there that you need to go to make your mark. There’s no point being on a network if there’s no-one else there to network with.

So, yeah, in conclusion, if you’ve got something to promote, no matter what it is, MySpace is probably going to be your first stop nowadays. I’m starting to buy into that old superstition about mirrors and cameras stealing your soul, though; I think some essential part of myself might now be spread all over Facebook, Bebo, Twitter…

There’s going to have to be a backlash at some point. Otherwise we’re all going to start melding into one another like some horrific thing from an 80s horror movie.