The Social Networks food chain

There’s that old illustration that school kids used to be shown where a small fish was eaten by a larger one that was in turn consumed by a larger one still – carnivores and the food chain. It feels a bit the same at the moment for Web 2.0 technologies, particularly in the political arena. The first well known social network in the UK was Bebo, but this was then (in politics at least) usurped by Second Life and John Edwards’s HQ there was attacked.

Then Facebook boomed in a major fashion, starting 12 months ago – every political campaign wanting to look cool needed its Facebook group. At the start of 2008 UK Facebook use declined. Now it seems that Twitter is the technology of the moment – the Twitter logo seems to be appearing with increasing regularity, and even Downing Street has a Twitter channel… I’ve never quite understood the point of Twitter personally – my status updates would be really tedious. But anyway, I better get to grips with it before an ever larger fish eats it up in the cool-ness stakes in the latter half of this year.