Edward Saatchi, son of millionaire advertising mogul Maurice Saatchi, is being billed as the UK's answer to Mark Zuckerberg. His private, enterprise focussed social network NationalField is credited as a key tool in President Obama's successful election campaign, and, after successfully expanding the network to incorporate major US businesses, the 26-year old is now hoping that a UK and European launch will similarly drive productivity and efficiency for new member organizations like the NHS.

Edward, could you give us a brief history of NationalField? How did it get off the ground?

It started in 2007; I went over to the Obama campaign and met Aharon (Wasserman, now NationalField's chief product officer) and Justin (Lewis, NationalField's chief technology officer). One of the big ideas was to register a lot of new voters into the electorate.

Everyone on the campaign was using spreadsheets and Google docs to track the work that was going on, mostly quantitative work; doors knocked on, calls being made, that sort of thing. So two nights after the three of us got together, we'd built the first version of NationalField so that all of our teams could communicate and spread the numbers around.

How did you build the network? What informed its design and the way it works?

We decided that it had to be social. As young middle managers, one of the major problems we faced was communicating up and down the chain of command, moving great ideas from one isolated team to another. Building something that facilitated that was very important.

NationalField understands the hierarchical social graph of your organization. The social networks that cater for our personal lives work on the manual inputs of subscribing to feeds, following and adding friends, whereas this instantly understands who you are within your company.

Is this how it differentiates itself from other networks then? What can be done here that can't already with a combination of, say, Facebook groups and LinkedIn contacts?

A lot of our competitors ported over the ideas of Facebook and the way that that works to the enterprise. Take Yammer, which also does private social networks, all based on who you friend and who you follow. There you have to follow, say, a 200 or a 1,000 co-workers and contacts, so again you're creating your own little silo. The difference here is that it's not based on friending and following. NationalField understands what office you're in, who you report to, who reports to you, and what your role is, what departments need regular contact with you. It builds the feed based on that. You can search for specifics, but the feed is a predictive "push" model.

Hierarchical structures can be a little scary, but it's actually really helpful to understand that in order to present the correct information to the correct people. Also, you're only going to get really sensitive and interesting information going into this if people feel it's secure within the organisation. People are less honest if it's public to the world , but once you start to make it a bit more structured, people are confident to talk through problems; team morale dropping after a staff member leaving, a meeting not going as planned, things like that. It's actually really important stuff that can fall through the cracks until problems really explode, and then all a sudden you've lost a deal and you don't know why there was no communication.

So is it fair to say part of the appeal of NationalField is the way it encourages a competitive edge in the workplace?

Yes. With Facebook, there are interesting psychological processes involved. It's almost a subconscious thing, when you see people sitting there clicking through photos, like some weird primal thing. We focus on metrics, where sites like Yammer have leaderboards of "Likes" and comments, things like that. We have that too, but sometimes that sort of information can be tangential to what's really important to running a business. Is it that important to know who is the most liked employee? Maybe they're really helpful, but maybe they're just liked because they wear cool clothes! Here it's the actual metrics that are the focus, and we heard campaign trail stories of people refreshing the site just to see how their numbers were shaping up compared to other teams. Social can be great in making that data really transparent.

But despite the competitiveness, I've never seen anything mean put up on NationalField. Because it's social, it constrains the negative side of competitiveness, but it awakens in people the fact that everything they do at work is really transparent. People can show just how well they're doing, so it's also much more about recognition in the workplace, what people are proud of. What social can do is make recognition really easy to share, for a manager to give credit where it's due. And with NationalField best practice can be shared too; because we can get what your role is, recognised strengths can be shared to other team members or managers. Did you see the F8 stuff?

Yes.

Facebook were using a phrase that we love: "Visualise data in ways which tell a story". It's what we felt we were doing right from the very launch of NationalField on the Obama campaign, trying to give each individual enough data so they could tell the story of the past few months of their work.

How did NationalField evolve during those early Obama campaign days? It must have been an intense time and environment within which to be working on a fledgling project?

Me and Aharon were really close friends for several months, and it all clicked when Justin came onboard. Justin was terrible at registering voters! He didn't like doing that. So we were in Savannah, Georgia, and together came up with a way to make the most of Justin's talents, hacking together something really fast for ourselves. It spread and grew in a similar way to those early Facebook days, with universities asking to come onboard; we did the same with the state and national campaign teams, staying up late to make sure they all got onto NationalField smoothly. Because it was based on Facebook in terms of design, it wasn't like we had to go around the country teaching people how to use it, it was really easy, intuitive.

Does NationalField cater for anonymity, if say you had a major or controversial complaint that you were worried about attaching your name to?

One of the interesting moments when we first started was around the "Ups and Downs" feature we have, which lets you flag the recent pros and cons of working at your company. We started with it completely bypassing middle management. We thought people would have no fear speaking their minds as, in larger corporations, often you've never met the top level executives if you work further down the chain. But then middle managers started saying, "actually, this is really undermining us". Which was a valid point. So we went back and worked in every single manager up the chain, and we found then that people felt completely protected, as middle management couldn't block something reaching the top levels. It changes working cultures, creates a place for constructive criticism and makes companies responsive and understanding. Once people start using it, people don't feel the need for anonymity. It's honest; social networking has brought down dictators, and it'll democratise the work place too.

So Barack Obama is obviously very social media savvy, and NationalField was instrumental in driving efficiency in his campaign. How does social media affect the public's perception of a potential candidate?

The cliché is that it presents a "connected person", but it really is a very practical tool, connecting with a lot more people. I don't know quite how all the party leaders managed to choreograph getting onto Google+ on exactly the same day! But it's helpful. President Obama is the best at harnessing it. He's actually comfortable with it and his campaign is organised around it. You still need an offline organising element, and for us technology was in service of the field. An online only campaign is very artificial. But if you do it in a way that emphasises community organisation and encourages volunteering and team building and so forth it's great.

Gearing up now for the Obama re-election campaign, has NationalField's role changed much in the interim years?

Yes, in the beginning its role was survival, like how the "hell do we keep this thing alive?" Now it's embedded in the organisation of the administration, and has been for a few years. It's becoming more of a platform, where you can build apps etcetera, so instead we're the portal for people who want to connect with organisations, letting them promote themselves, their work and internal apps. The emphasis now is on changing companies and work practice, and building the platform.

Does Obama make for a good boss?

He makes an incredible boss. At the inauguration ball he came and spoke to us all and said, "look, you're going to go back out into the world, back to companies or non-profits, and I want you to take with you the methodology that we created on this campaign, being bottom up and paying most attention to the field work". Because he'd been a community organiser far longer than any of us had, he had a real respect for the people on the ground. I got to meet him a few times through the course of the campaign, and he's very inspiring.

You're the first to admit that NationalField visually apes Facebook. Facebook's Chris Hughes is even on your board. Is visual familiarity important to the success of an online product?

Yeah, I've been saying it but I haven't really thought about it as a rule. I don't know why people would bother creating something for the workplace that isn't familiar to us through our consumer lives. At this point it just seems petty and pointless. It's ridiculous to be expected to learn a new system. The consumer world, through dealing with hundreds of millions of people, has figured out really smart ways to move information, so why should we ignore that? You should use systems that are really super familiar.

So moving onto the UK/ European launch. You've got the NHS as a new member, but running a national health organisation is a vastly different beast to running an election campaign. How can NationalField help the NHS?

We actually started in the US with Kaiser Permanente, the largest American health organisation. We got a real insight into how healthcare works with that. I think the thing that is important in health is that your patients remain the most important people, so if you can get people on the ground really connected, working together to cut costs while improving patient care, you can make a big difference. Because the NHS is so big, getting people to share best practices around cutting costs is really helpful; great ideas can be isolated in one place for years, but as we've seen with Kaiser Permanente, you can use NationalField to move such information around really really fast.

We met a woman when going up and down the country with the NHS who said "I can go home and tell my daughter I just got Facebook training." The positive energy that goes towards this, compared to if we were creating clunky intranets (which we're out to destroy), makes people feel they're not being forced to learn a new clunky thing. That should be a paradigm for what people are building.

Have there been many tweaks needed to bring the network to Europe?

It's interesting, I haven't been asked that before. Nothing drastic comes to mind. Language; so we added international localisation, having it in the language of your choice. But we haven't even needed to make any terminology changes. Because Facebook again has given people a feel for how information, should move and what they can expect from a feed, it hasn't had to be changed that much. It's kind of like a global thing, something that plays into that paradigm we mentioned earlier, building things that are familiar from our consumer lives. In the English speaking world we're all going to the same websites. Take the Huffington Post's UK launch; it has a little flag saying it's our version, and that's very nice, but it doesn't matter, I'm familiar with the way they present something and I'd be perfectly happy to read the content just through the way they present information.

How about international, cultural differences? Have their been any particular nations that have been more or less receptive to NationalField?

I think it's the same as what you'd imagine with Facebook and Twitter. The speed of uptake really parallels it. Younger generations in each company tend to get it first, say a new leader in a new department of an organisation, they want to make a change. I wouldn't say it's nation by nation, it's more about somebody wanting to build something that a new generation coming into the workforce can understand.

Do you still see a generational gap between youth and older members of society when it comes to the uptake of new social media ideas?

I think so, to a degree. We've seen it hit a tipping point now where we're conducting more communication points through social networking than email. A good leader is one that can see the trend and say "OK, let's get ahead of it". Social is a huge wave; there are films made about it, it's a big deal now. Look at the trend lines, look at things that are doing well in the consumer world, and that always points towards how things are going to change in the enterprise world. Our personal systems are much more sophisticated now than our enterprise ones, and a good leader should, or instance, be able to see the decline of email and adapt to that, using a system that everyone understands. It's not just young people who use Facebook, but it is young people who drove its growth.

We've spoke a lot about very large companies. Is using NationalField beneficial to use in smaller companies of, say, 10 or so people?

We actually find that organisations of around 25 people or larger is where you see the sweet spot kick in. Once you're at that point, you cant fit everybody in a crowded meeting room. Communication starts to break down at that point, and that's the ideal point to put the system in place. Beyond 25 people, into the hundreds and thousands of employees, it scales remarkably easily, with your feed out of the box.

How do you feel about being billed as the UK's answer to Mark Zuckerberg?

It's very nice! The thing that I think is cool about Mark Zuckerberg is the fact he was a psychology major. He has a moral mission. Every single time they change their privacy permissions, people feel like "Oh my god, they're trying to push more advertisements my way". But the aim is that really we should be more open about ourselves, which is obviously the end aim of psychology in a way. And I think that's really honourable, and really cool. Our moral mission is, considering we spend most of our waking lives at work, that if you feel like every single day you're working without getting any credit or recognition, that's a disaster, and a disaster we can prevent. The similarity there is the desire to figure out the underlying psychological need that a technology can answer, how we can use technology to make you feel good, make you feel productive.

So with Zuckerberg's story told in The Social Network, who would you like to see playing you in "NationalField: The Movie"?

Ahh, very good question. Who are people with big hair? Ah, Art Garfunkel! There you go. Though his poor hairline seemed to go up and up and up! He's actually a really good actor as well, you should see some of his stuff!

Sutro Digital brings you this week's social media news in handy video format. Among this week's highlights are Manchester bobbies on the tweet and Skype integration with Facebook.

If you're a UK resident and haven't been living under a stone for the last month, you'll know that today is vote-casting day in one of the most closely run General Elections in recent history. Facebook, recognising its platform's ability to encourage people to vote, has added an "I've Voted" button for UK users over 18 years old to mark the occasion.

So far, over half a million Facebook users have cast their vote. The vote tracker sits at the top of a user's news feed as a reminder to head out to the polling station, and while it doesn't directly reveal the voters party affiliation or location, it does offer the opportunity to leave a comment.

The tracker, which was used similarly in the 2008 US Presidential election, also invites users to check out the UK Democracy Facebook page, where vocal voters are engaged currently in some pretty heated debates.

NME and BlackBerry are to team up on a new social network. Breakthrough will be primarily aimed at musicians and music fans, allowing users to upload music and videos onto a network teeming with music aficionados.

Uploaded music will also have a chance of being featured in the coveted NME magazine itself, as well as offering opportunities for bands to play at high-profile shows such as the Lovebox festival in London.

David Moynihan, NME.COM editor, said: "NME Breakthrough supported by Blackberry is a step for us in providing a channel for artists and our users to connect with each other. Our website and magazine play a key role in keeping our audience informed with the latest news and expert reviews, and this new social networking platform is giving our users direct interaction with bands.

"It also acts as an important medium for bands to listen to what their fans want, through a simple rating feature. In addition, we are going to offer amazing opportunities on the site; the rewarded artists will perform at an NME Radar event as well as a key festival this summer."

With NME's cool-seal of approval lending the network some credibility and direct access to key music journos, Breakthrough could be an up-and-coming artists best shot at stardom.

Check it out here.

If there is one thing other than "Bigotgate" that this General Election will be remembered for, it'll be the growing use of social media to share party policies and give voice to the nation's voters. From the #nickcleggsfault hashtag to former Labour candidate Stuart MacLennan's offensive tweets, there has been both plenty to talk about and plenty of ways to share and interact during the campaign.

The micro-blogging Twitter craze in particular has caught on with time-strapped politicians and political commentators alike, offering a vast forum in which to throw quick glimpses of life on the campaign trail.

It can, however, be a bit daunting too, with Tweets relating to the election climbing above the hundred-thousand mark during the Election debates.

To help you navigate all the different streams of info available to voters, here is a brief guide to the 15 Must-Follow Twitter feeds of the General Election.

Labour

@uklabour : The official twitter feed for the Labour party, aggregating tweets from many Labour candidates.
@SarahBrown10 : Sarah Brown, wife of PM Gordon, tweets very regularly, and quite often replies to her followers.
@campbellclaret : Labour sultan of spin Alastair Campbell can be very outspoken on his feed. Definitely worth following.
@Dmiliband : Foreign secretary David Miliband's Twitter feed. Keeps it simple, mostly documenting his travels up and down the campaign trail, though a recent "Ross Kemp is a rock star" tweet made me laugh.
@JohnPrescott : Another fairly vocal and prolific tweeter, John Prescott surprisingly counts Gok Wan as among his followers!

Conservatives

@Conservatives : The official feed of the Conservative party, again pulling together related feeds from all over the shop.
@mayoroflondon : Boris Johnson's feed this one. Another regular user, but has stayed unusually quiet during the election
@toryradio : The Tory radio feed founded by Jonathan Sheppard. Calls the Lib Dems the "Fib Dems" on a regular basis. Oh how I chuckled...
@iaindale : Twitter feed for Iain Dale, a prolific Tory blogger who considers himself "Much wittier than your average Tory".

Liberal Democrats

@libdems : The official feed for all your Liberal Democrat needs, aggregating content from many pro-lib dem feeds.
@nick_clegg : Nick Cleggs twitter feed which is unsurprisingly, though disappointingly, managed by David Angell. Plenty of followers though.
@joswinson : Lib Dem candidate for East Dunbartonshire. Jo Swinson tweets a lot, and not all about politics. For instance, her last tweet reads "Digestive Caramels: too moreish..." Mmm yummy biscuit politics.

Other

@tweetminister : Tweet Minister aggregates all the major General Election trends, feeds and hashtags. Be warned however; it moves at a frightening pace and can be quite overwhelming at peak news times.
@aiannucci : Armando Ianucci, comedian and writer of The Thick Of It, takes charge of this feed. Always funny, pointed and satirical.
@theelectionblog : The feed for www.theelectionblog.co.uk. Lots of good content every day from these guys, who strive to put up one new interview everyday.

Facebook Lite has been shut down by Facebook, after going live just recently in September of last year.

The service was intended to offer a low-bandwidth version of the social network. It stripped Facebook back to its basics (status updates, wall posts and photo uploads) and removed some of the more data-intensive functions such as apps.

"We're no longer supporting it, but learned a lot from the test of a slimmed-down site," read a post on the Lite Facebook fan page.

So why close the service? Well it's likely that demand just wasn't that great; with myriad bandwidth saving apps and Facebook Mobile all available, as well as the growing speeds of internet connections worldwide, the majority of Facebook users just simply prefer the full-fat flavour.

That said though, the Facebook Lite fan page has a hefty 69,198 fans, so maybe a few tears will be shed after all.

Facebook have announced that their "Like" button is about to become available across the web. Acting as a content sharing button similar to StumbleUpon and Digg, clicking the button when browsing online will send a link to the user's Facebook news stream to be shared with all their contacts after a single press.

The button is to be officially unveiled at the Facebook F8 conference in San Francisco this week, having only been displayed briefly to marketers at a pre-show conference over the weekend, the Financial Times are reporting.

Whilst Facebook believe the "Like" button will make the web more social, cynics believe it to be just another tool for the Facebook team to use to mine data about their users and further refine their advertising techniques.

The "Like" button is already expected to replace the "Become a fan" button tied to brands on the site, with these "engagement ads" already used by advertisers to get access to user's data and to insert promotional material into their news feeds.

In a post that we could just have easily titled "You Should Have Been Doing That Years Ago", Myspace have today moved into the live music sphere, allowing artists using the site to sell tickets to events and shows on their profile pages.

Alongside the ticket selling tools, the new platform also includes a calendar which you can use to track your favourite artists' tours, shows and release dates, as well as keeping up to date with what your friends are planning to attend too.

Myspace's current database already has 1 million-odd shows listed, so there are plenty of opportunities to try out the platform as well as getting out there and exploring new music.

It's about time Myspace started shaking up their service, as the latest stats show their user numbers have dropped significantly.

We all know by now that Facebook has really trounced the competition in the social networking stakes, but lets spare a thought for those floundering in its wake. New statisitcs published by HitWise have shown that both Bebo and Myspace have had a massive drop in UK usage since this time three years ago.

After a peak in UK traffic in the middle of 2007, Myspace and Bebo have seen a steady fall from about 1.5% of web use to less than 0.2% today. Conversely, Facebook, who in mid 2007 were at roughly that same 1.5% position of UK web use, have gone from strength to strength, now commanding somewhere in the region of 6.22% of UK traffic.

Twitter and YouTube are the second and third most popular social networks respectively, with Yahoo Answers, Windows Live, Google Videos and (somewhat surprisingly) the kiddie-friendly Club Penguin all featuring in the top ten.

For the full list of stats click here to head over to HitWise.

Related Stories: AOL to sell or close Bebo social network

It has been revealed that the flailing social network Bebo is set to be shut down or sold off by its owners AOL.

It was just two years ago that AOL bought the social network for a reported $850 million. However, an internal email from the company's start-up acquisition and investment unit, AOL Ventures state that Bebo is in dire need of "significant investment" for it to survive, a sum that the once mighty AOL can no longer afford.

The email said: "Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space. AOL is not in a position at this time to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking."

Bebo, once the most popular social networking site in the UK and Ireland felt its popularity slip to the likes of Myspace and the meteoric rise of Facebook. With roughly 5 million users, Bebo has been completely overshadowed by Facebook, who now command a loyal user base of over 210 million.

I've heard of people going out of their way for a Foursquare badge, but this is ridiculous. 15 year-old Parker Liautaud hopes to be the first person in the world to check into Foursquare (the popular location game/social networking iPhone app mash-up) at the North Pole.

As if being one of the youngest people to ever ski to the North Pole wasn't enough, the son of billionaire Business Objects co-founder Bernard Liautard will also earn the Last Degree badge, specially created by the Foursquare team for his expedition.

Liautaud apparently attends the prestigious Eton College, once home to Prince Harry and Prince William. With an education like that you'd think he'd have a bit more common sense really, wouldn't you? But it's all for a good cause, as he is is trying to raise awareness about and funds for environmental issues facing the Arctic.

I'm guessing fund raising days at Eton with chocolate Rice Krispie cakes and a tombola would all seem a bit tame for billionaire heirs then?

Check out Parker Liautaud's Facebook page for his trip here, and check out how his preparations are going in the YouTube clip above.

The war on copyright infringers has just stepped up another notch. Global entertainment giant Warner Brothers have placed an advert for a £17,000-a-year job at their London headquarters for an "Anti-Piracy Intern".

The job will involve scouring message boards, issuing copyright infringement notices, monitoring BitTorrent sites and generally searching for those pesky illegal downloaders who are supposedly syphoning millions off Warner Brothers exorbitant profits.

A successful applicant will need knowledge of FTP and IRC, and "peer to peer networking". They should also have "web experience" -- which is improbably vague.

Basically you'll be a little Internet grass. The modern equivalent of a TV license van, except as opposed to staking out student flats from a transit van, you'll be sat in an office looking at a screen.

We'd kind of got it into our heads that Warner Brothers would have a whole copyright infringement department, working on Minority Report-esque screens, building up a database of infringers, who as soon as legislation is passed, they'd send very strongly worded letters to.

It might be a bit late in the day, but shouldn't we boycott this job? We know the recession has crippled the job market, but come on. It'd be great.

[Via The Register]

Ok, so updating your Facebook profile isn't ever going to make you rich, however there are a few ways where you can use social networking to make you a few quid. Here's five for starters. Anyone know any more?

Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone have hinted at SxSW this week that they are planning to expand their micro-blogging platform with a new service called @anywhere. Though the pair will not completely reveal the service until their own developer conference in April, their media session in Texas and the company blog reveal a few snippets of information.

By inserting just "a few lines of javascript" to a website, it seems that the @anywhere service will allow surfers to send tweets from the page they are visiting, without being re-directed back to Twitter.com.

"We've developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com," Stone said on the company blog.

The service will initially be introduced to a few "big" sites that include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, eBay, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

"Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page" Stone continued. "And that's just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting."

Expect more on this come Twitter's April developer conference.

Here's a really nifty tool for those looking to start their own private social networks away from the masses of Twitter and Facebook users. Shout'em enables users to easily and quickly create their own mobile social networks that are private, targeted to niche groups and location-based.

Using a mixture of web tools and mobile apps for iPhone, BlackBerry or soon Android too, Shout'em lets users create networks without any knowledge of programming, with networks up and running within just minutes of getting started.

Once you've got your network going, you can include a host of location-aware features, include camera and upload functions, and also manage those who have access to your network.

Sergio Lilavois used Shout'em to found the WE Harlem network in the USA:  "Twitter is too big, with Shoutem we can keep it focused. Shoutem is the best fit for what we are looking for: good features and  reliable technology.  I like the flow of Shoutem: it is not complicated and people can easily see what to do," Lilavois said.

"It's a very user-friendly interface.  People spend a lot of their time communicating on their mobiles.   50% of the time I'm logged into Shoutem myself it's from my mobile device.  It's great that there's a mobile application for Shoutem, not just an API.  It's meant we haven't needed to develop it ourselves."

Click here to give Shout'em a try, free of charge.

WordPress, a massively popular blogging and hosting platform suffered severe problems yesterday, causing some 10.2 million blogs to go offline for almost two hours. It has been estimated that 5.5 million page views were wiped, the worst outage WordPress has encountered in over 4 years.

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress founder, apologised profusely on the WordPress blog, and gave an explanation as to the crash.

"An unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven't experienced before, and broke the site." He noted, stating that this problem also brought down backup procedures for the site.

"I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again." Mullenweg concluded.

Thankfully, no data was lost in the outage, and all blogs seem to have resumed a normal service. However, imagine if the problem had caused a data wipe? Over 10 million blogs worth of data could have been lost. It just goes to act as a reminder of how fragile the online world can sometimes be.

Facebook has announced that it will be releasing a text-only, low bandwidth version of their social network called Facebook Zero, designed specifically with mobile phones in mind.

It should please users and network operators alike; Facebookers get a super-fast version to browse if they're trying to take it easy on their data usage, while bandwidth is freed up for network providers.

Over 100 million people access Facebook from their mobiles, according to Facebook, with the GSM Association noting that 2.2 billion minutes were spent browsing the network in December from mobile handsets alone.

The Facebook Zero site has already gone live (http://zero.facebook.com) though it cannot be used until network providers take it up.

Should help alleviate the pain of stumbling across embarrassing "pictures from the night before" online though.

Via: BBC

Click here for more Tech Digest coverage from MWC 2010

Google have entered the social networking fray with their new Buzz network. It's not the first time they've tried their hand at social networking (their Orkut network has a very respectable 100 million users), but by integrating it into their Gmail service they already have an installed user-base of 170 million, a figure that completely dwarfs Twitter's audience.

From Google's point of view, a land-grab on the social networking scene is a no brainer. Though they now have access to the Twitter pipeline, it's near impossible to monetise through advertising, while the 400 million users of Facebook and all their user-created content also eludes their clutches. Buzz offers Google more pages to advertise through and further information to be mined on their users.

For an in-depth look at Google Buzz's features, check this post by Tech Digest's Ashley Norris.

It's not a completely cynical move by Google however; Buzz does have some nice features, particularly on mobile devices. For instance, if public status updates are posted on a mobile, they not only become searchable, but are also geo-tagged by your current location thanks to integrated Google Maps support. If perchance Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie took a low-key trip to your local Lidl, you could post a quick update and get all of your nearby friends to descend on the scene, cameras and autograph books in hand without the need for messaging each individually and dishing out directions. Sure, Foursquare may have got their first, but it'll be a great way to quickly find out everything going on in your locality, giving it one over Facebook whilst on the move.

The problem lies with attracting new users to the service. While 170 million potential Buzzers (I may well have just coined a new term there!) is a massive figure, it's got a fair bit of catching up to do if it plans on competing with Facebook's 400 million users. While it's easy for Gmail users to jump right in, there will be many groaning at the thought of managing yet another network and separate email account to access it, myself included. I wouldn't call myself a dyed-in-the wool Hotmail user, but to me juggling one personal and one work email is quite enough, thank you very much.

For instance, if you've got a blinged out Myspace page with 8 billion friends, all your drunken holiday snaps posted and (unfortunately) tagged on Facebook, and are secretly stalking Ashton Kutcher's geo-tagged posts on Twitter, can you be bothered with the rigmarole of establishing yourself all over again on a new network?

I mean, seriously, how many status streams do we need to be connected to? Rather than being the definitive online social space it's really just a mish-mash, "Frankenstein's monster" of all the best bits from Facebook and Twitter. It's not really bringing people together in any new way, it's just further diluting people's interactions across yet another network.

This may sound a little fascistic, but surely the world would be better connected on just the one single network rather than spread thinly over several? I'm all for choice, but when it's just between a series of cookie-cutter clones, I'm starting to think my time would be better spent socialising the old fashioned way; a meet up down the pub with a few friends...organised through a Facebook event, of course.

The world's richest man and founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates has finally joined Twitter. With a nod to his programming roots, he kicked off proceedings with a first tweet of "hello world".

There have been plenty of fake accounts set up in his name, but this one finally looks like the real deal, having been confirmed by Twitter's own Caroline Mizumoto.

Looking to follow him? Look up the Microsoft main-man at @BillGates.

But who is Gates following?! Ashley Tisdale and Ashton Kutcher are among his followed, as well as numerous charities and news sites.

Having retired from his top post at Microsoft, Gates now focuses on his philanthropic work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

TWITTER HAS BEEN BANNED...well for some well known sportsmen at least. No this isn't the latest clampdown from communist China, it's the Premiership's very own Manchester United riling against social networking.

The football club have taken control of Twitter accounts belonging to Ryan Giggs, Darren Fletcher and Wayne Rooney, while Facebook accounts for Rio Ferdinand, Wes Brown and again Ryan Giggs have also been commandeered.

A message on the club's site hammers home the new attitude to web networking. "The club wishes to make it clear that no Manchester United players maintain personal profiles on social networking websites. Fans encountering any web pages purporting to be written by United players should treat them with extreme skepticism."

Rio Ferdinand still seems to have an official looking Myspace page available. If anyone's interested in either Ferdinand or Myspace anymore that is.

So why the clampdown? Players revealing club secrets? Unlikely; that's nothing that zealous fan sites don't eventually mine out anyway. More likely, the clubs want to ensure maximum traffic hits their own homepages. Why would fans go through a third-party when you can interact directly with the players themselves through social networks?

Still, some clubs aren't so fussy. Take Sunderland for instance; Darren Bent's Twitter account has 30,000 followers, and often reveals some interesting details about the player, including his struggles with former club Tottenham Hotspur.