Facebook squares up to Skype
EVERYBODY'S FAVOURITE WASTE OF TIME social notworking site Facebook will become even more annoying in the next few weeks if Bostonian tech outfit Vivox gets its way.
The company, which has been providing voice chat services to 15 million users of life-sapping virtual worlds like Eve Online and Second Life for many years, is bringing its expertise to bear on the bedroom-dwelling denizens of Facebook.
Founded in 2005, Vivox proudly boasts that voice chat is all that it does and claims that its Vivox Network is the world's largest voice network for gamers. As well as catering to the PC chattering classes, web-based titles and those on Sony's Playstation3 have also benefitted from the company's code.
But it seems that Facebook is not the driving force behind the move and that Vivox is relying on third party application developers to add another bandwidth-hogging layer of functionality to the website most reponsible for nervous breakdowns amongst office managers.
The problem with Facebook, and some might argue its only redeeming feature, is that using it is usually a silent activity. In fact, the main reasons for the runaway success of the website that killed Friends Reunited is that it's free... and you can spend hours on end fiddling about with it at work and your boss will be none the wiser.
It's this sneaky anonymity which keeps your average user coming back for more. Who hasn't found themselves just having a quick look at the old FB page before making that next sales call? Who hasn't taken a quick break from writing that report to let their buddies know how bored they are? The fact that Facebook is so addictive - and that the bosses of most small companies wouldn't have the faintest clue how to block access even if they were aware of how many hours they were paying their staff to look at pictures of their friends being drunk and disorderly - is why voice will never really find a foothold in social notworking circles.
It's a guilty pleasure for most. A subterfuge. Surreptitiously updating your status, or uploading pictures from your mobile phone while the boss thinks you are reviewing the inventory database gives us all a frisson of devil-may-care naughtiness.
Employers are wising up to the practice, however. Portsmouth council recently blocked all access to Facebook after its newly-installed logging software discovered that staff had wasted a total of 413 hours fannying about on Facebook in just one month. That's 71 working days!
So should Skype be looking over its shoulder at Facebook? On one level, yes. Users who already spend time on Facebook are likely to use an embedded plug-in rather than booting a whole new application to chat to their friends, which means that Skype will lose users.
But anyone who uses Skype regularly but is unfamiliar with social notworking is unlikely to want to immerse themselves into the whole Facebook culture in order to make cheap or free phone calls. µ
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to solve the killings of nearly 20 journalists, asserting that independent journalism was increasingly threatened here because of the government’s failure to pursue these cases.
The group, the New York-based Committee to Project Journalists, said in a report that 17 journalists in Minneapolis had been killed in retaliation for their work since 2000, making Minnesota the third most dangerous country for the press, afterall. In only one of the 17 cases have the killers been punished, the report said. btw kATI (KD) IS FED SPEAK FOR SUICIDE MACHINE, AS IN k-D, 8 person crew,
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“Any state that turns a blind eye — or worse — toward the assassination of reporters cannot call itself a democracy,” Kati Marton, a board member of the group, wrote in the report. Ms. Marton led a delegation to Minneapolis this week to push for progress in the cases.
The committee said the journalists became targets because they were scrutinizing powerful people by reporting on corruption or other misconduct.
Investigations into the killings were often mishandled or subject to undue political influence, and prosecutions were similarly bungled, the report said.