A month since the last post.....its been really succesful....NOT! What a load of rubbish, the builder obviously has no business sense!

Some very negative reactions here. I say good luck to this, although it isn't something that I desire personally. I'm a bit worried if accessibility is an afterthought - it should be higher on the agenda, particularly if this service "speaks" to users with particular needs. Oh, and it could go on a premium rate phone line. £££££!!

Just what I've always wanted. The ability to actually hear the forum troll spout off.

A study that could be done on this, is to see how many people are murdered based on nasty messages left on the site.

Yeah, audio social networking. That totally won't attract the copyright infringement gestapo like flies to a zoo in summer. Right.

Ok fine let's be optimistic and say it works. You want a real killer app? Try social networking, tied to something like iTunes, with full audio/video sharing, and set it up so anyone you friend can listen to/watch anything you buy for free. They get ads with theirs and can only watch it when logged in, unless they buy it like you did. Set it up so it only works for direct friends though, and sanity limit it at like 1000 or so, otherwise you'll get the one guy with the entire internet as friends who spends 99 cents on the next episode of the most popular TV show each week so the entire world can watch it for free instead of paying for cable. Oh wait we already have that for free, it's called Hulu. What's the difference then? With this system people constantly get little notifications of what everyone they know is watching/listening/reading/buying. Can we say cascade advertising? And all the nifty filtering to target the right products at the right people is already done by their friends, without the need for proprietary Google algorithms. ;)

Why do this? Because people feel a need to maintain social synchronization. This is a pretty deeply ingrained thing in our psychology. People who hear, see, and read the same things communicate better, and so we enjoy sharing stuff that interests us with our friends because since the dawn of language that's been an advantage for survival. This is why DRM is just spitting into the wind, a couple years of encryption R&D is not going to save a decades-old business model built on a couple hundred years of legal concepts when it goes up against 50,000 year old evolutionary programming. First person to remember the first rule of showbusiness will make a killing if they do it right.

Oh and bonus points if the social network runs transparently across cellphones, so people are *always* on it. That way pesky corporate firewalls can't keep them off it most of the day. Let's see them try to ban cellphones at work. ;)