Disruptive Conversations

In its article today, "Fogeys Flock to Facebook" (cute alliteration of the letter F, by the way) Business Week talks about the rise in Facebook usage by the older crowd:

But older users are behind the recent traffic surge at Facebook, which says it signs up 150,000 new users a day. In June, 11.5 million of the individual visitors to the site were 35 or older, more than double the number a year before, according to market researcher ComScore Media Metrix. The 35-and-up crowd now accounts for more than 41% of all Facebook visitors.

Given that yours truly counts among the 35 and older crowd, I had to comment on that.  As Facebook claims now to have 33 million members, does that 11.5 million individual users mean that we of the older set now represent a third of Facebook's population?

Readers have seen my writing about Facebook and my various concerns, but I do continue to use the site.  I do, though, think that if Facebook is to keep the older crowd, it will need to grow up a bit in the way it handles members.  For instance, the way networks are sorted is skewed toward dating and setting up Facebook events is really all about partying!

It will definitely be interesting to see: 1) if the old fogeys stay around without some changes; and 2) if the college-age crowd sticks around as their parents come into Facebook!  (At a recent conference another Facebook user talked of joining the site and then "friending" her teenage daughter, who wasn't entirely sure about that!)

Jeff Pulver also wrote a companion article, "Confessions of a LinkedIn Dropout", that continues the thread he began on his blog back in mid-July where Jeff has said that he's stopping his regular use of LinkedIn in favor of Facebook.

Meanwhile, over on his blog, Jason Calcanis is declaring "Facebook Bankruptcy" and saying he's overloaded, which he follows up with a post on "Social Network Exhaustion".

All in all, just more signs that life in the world of Facebook will continue to be quite interesting!

 Why doesn't TypePad Mobile work with Blackberries?  As I was loading my new Blackberry with apps that I use, I thought to myself "Hmmm... doesn't TypePad have an app for posting from your mobile device?"  Not that I'll type long entries on it, given the keyboard size, but there are times when it would be great to dash off a quick entry from my mobile device.

Sure enough, they do... TypePad Mobile.  But it only works on:

• Palm OS 5
• Windows Mobile 5
• Symbian Series 60

Um... excuse me, TypePad folks... if you are trying in general to cater to business users, aren't you kind of forgetting a certain platform from that list?  Like, oh... the millions of business users of RIM's Blackberries?

Now, granted, I can update TypePad via the web browser on the Blackberry, or email in a post (however, you can only set up email posts for a single TypePad blog and I write across several blogs that are under the same TypePad account), but it would be very nice if TypePad could make an app available for Blackberry users that made it easier to post from that platform.

Recently I've given some thought to doing some experimentation with a video podcast.  My initial thought is something in conjunction with my Disruptive Telephony blog to show/discuss some of the things happening in the world of telephony.  I anticipate doing it with a webcam on my laptop and then perhaps also with recording video on my Canon digital camera (once I get a new one).  For my current experimentation, I'm thinking that I'll just use Windows Movie Maker to add title and end slides and do whatever minimal editing I need. 

But my question is this: where do I host it?

What I am looking for is a site where I can upload the video in some format and have it automagically converted to appropriate viewing formats, complete with the ability to embed video players in blogs.  Though I expect that I'll primarily promote the blogs on my own web page, I would like to be able to have a "show" web page on the hosting site.  At the moment, I'm not really interested in running ads, I don't think, but I guess at some point that might be an interesting option - but I want control over exactly what ads go where.  Today, really all I'm looking for is a publishing platform.

A year and a bit ago, when I first looked at doing something with video, there didn't seem to be all that many choices other than, say, YouTube.  But today, there seem to be a great many players in the space.  I'm NOT looking to do a live show, so that pretty much seems to rule out ustream and blogtv.com.  It seems that to me that some of the major players are the following:

• blip.tv
• hipcast.com
• brightcove.com
• podshow
• and then, of course, YouTube

So my question for you all out there reading this is - if you are doing a video podcast or video blog or vlog or whatever you want to call it, where are you hosting your videos?  And why did you use that site/service?

Any thoughts/comments/feedback would be most appreciated. (Thanks!)

As did many users this morning, I tried to login to Facebook this morning only to find the message displayed on the right - sorry, we're down for maintenance.  I've been too busy in the last couple of days here at the conference to go onto Facebook, but I've seen a number of messages on Twitter that people have been having problems getting into the site over the past couple of days

Given that Facebook wants to be the "social operating system", the question is - what is their plan for being available?  Are they having scaling issues?    If people come to use Facebook as a communication medium, what plans does Facebook have in place to ensure that it is available when people want to communicate?