Asavin Wattanajantra recently wrote a list of things he’d learned in his first 7 months as an IT journalist. Which pretty much covers it, but since this week marks my second full year working for Micro Mart, I figured I’d, er, shamelessly steal the idea and write my own list.

1. Free stuff is great. I utterly agree that we love getting free stuff, particularly when you don’t have to give it back.

2. You rarely get the free stuff you want, though, because everyone else wants it too.

3. PRs often have a radically different idea of what constitutes a “high-res” image than we do.

4. Nothing you’re actively looking for, be it story, specifications, or pictures, will ever show up until after the deadline has passed.

5. … but on a weekly magazine you can usually just use it next week, instead.

6. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

7. Anything that can’t go wrong - because it’s all sorted out, everything’s fine, everyone knows what they’re doing and there’s loads of time left! - will go wrong. Things that will easily destroy any sense of organisation: illness, injury, weather, trains, and babies.

8. Speaking of trains, somehow you still always manage to go through a tunnel at exactly the most inconvenient moment in a mobile phone conversation.

9. I will never learn to carry a laptop around. Those things are heavy.

10. Apple product launches are hypnotic (and people will re-fill your wine glass when you’re not looking, which adds to the effect). If Steve Jobs is enthusiastic about it, I will want it. The effect takes a couple weeks to wear off.

11. … admittedly, I’d still quite like an iPhone, though, so that’s not really worn off at all.

12. Just because a product is billed as the fastest/most efficient/quietest/smallest/etc, doesn’t mean that’s actually true. And even if it is, it’ll only stay true for about a week.

13. Making puns based around Flash Gordon references for stories about flash memory stops being funny really fast.

14. Getting noticed by Google News is awesome.

15. The more often you update your blog, the more attention you’ll attract. (Actually, I think I learned this one from just blogging, generally, in a non-work sense, but shhh.)

16. No matter what you write about, someone somewhere will disagree with you.

17. But hey, at least that means they’re reading!

18. I really don’t understand how or why to use Twitter, but I’m sort of trying. In between waiting for it to stop being broken.

19. The best sentence I’ve written so far is “Take these rats off my Internet face!” Context? Er, no. I’ll just let that one stand alone.

20. There can never be enough coffee.

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:  it might be yet another social networking site offering almost the same features as Facebook with one added, killer feature, or it might be something completely different. These things have a limited shelf life - it’s just that certain media outlets seem to have been a bit too quick to declare Facebook the best thing ever, and now seem to be panicking a bit now that it turns out that Facebook is just another website.

Truth be told, there’s just not a lot to do on Facebook. When you first sign up, there’s lots - you have to create a profile, filling in lots of information about yourself and putting up your most flattering pictures, but eventually, you run out of things to do, and end up visiting less often. Really, it’s a tool for keeping in touch with your friends - an online address book that lets you play games and look at pictures. The fact that its traffic is going into decline doesn’t mean a whole lot, except that the general Internet public is quite fickle about how and where it chooses to waste its time.

It’s an interesting and much remarked upon phenomena that social networking sites insist on defining everyone as your “friend.” On LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and, until recently, Twitter, anyone you wanted to allow to view your blog and/or profile got stuck on a list labelled “friends.”

But it’s always been a bit of a misnomer. Okay, sure, the first few people you contact on any social networking site is likely to be a friend; probably even one you met and know in the real world. But within a couple of weeks, you’ll find you’re adding all sorts of people - on LiveJournal and Twitter, it’ll be people whose posts you want to read, whether or not you know anything about them beyond their writing style; on MySpace it’ll probably be bands, movies, and completely random people with whom you’ll exchange approximately seven messages and then never hear from again. Facebook is a little different (mostly thanks to the attitudes of its users) but even there you’ll be adding family, university roommates, coworkers, ex-coworkers, ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, friends of friends, people you met once at a party, work contacts…

And not all of them are actually what you’d call your friends.

This week, Twitter sent out an announcement: it would no longer call the users to whom you’ve subscribed your “friends.” Instead, you’ll choose to “follow” them; and they’ll follow you. You’re a follower, and you, in turn, have followers.

Which, when you think about it, probably isn’t all that much better. It has connotations either of mad stalking behaviour, or religious undertones.

Maybe we need to make up some new words. Much as I hate all the newly coined words used to describe Web 2.0 phenomena (except “blog”, that one’s fine) maybe we need a word to define people-with-whom-I-network-online-but-not-in-real-life. Or perhaps we need social networking sites to give us a way to shift people into handy groups - these ones can see everything, these ones are work colleagues and I don’t want them to see pictures of me drunk, that’s my ex-boyfriend and though I can’t snub him I don’t want him to know anything about me or my life.

What d’you reckon?