Having spent most of my working life building websites, I was alarmed to hear rumours of the web’s demise.   Many are postulating that thanks to the rise of the App, the World Wide Web is reaching the end of its useful life.

I had hoped that at least one or two of the websites I’d helped to create would remain on-line, as my epitaph, long after I’d joined the big social network in the sky.

But web traffic is reportedly on the decrease as Internet access goes mobile, thanks to the Smartphone revolution.  The web’s problem is that you need a proper keyboard to use it and on a handheld device, an App is much easier to use.

Pundits are now also predicting a third dotcom type financial bubble which I’m going to christen ‘AppDotCom’, thanks to Facebook recently parting with $1 billion for the Instagram mobile App.

Most agree it was a ludicrous price for a tiny piece of software, but worth every penny to the owner of the world’s most popular website, clearly worried about the future of the web.

Facebook has its own App, but most of its mobile users seem to prefer Instagram , for ease of use when it comes to sharing photos.  Facebook, obviously learning from the previous technology titan, Microsoft, have adopted a policy of  “if you can’t beat them, buy them”.

The fact is that if Facebook had been invented today, it would be an App not a website.

There is, however, an ideological problem with AppDotCom; it leaves Apple and Google in charge of the Internet. The only real place you can get Apps from is the Apple Store (for iPhone/iPad) and the Google Play Store (for Android devices).

Right now if you want to sell or even give away your “billion-dollar-app”, you’ll need the blessing of at least one of them.

AppDotCom may end up creating the virtual equivalent of the Twin Towers, ruling the Internet for good or for evil, if this is not indeed already the case with Google!

note: This and simular articles can be found in the Birmingham Post here:

http://blogs.birminghampost.net/business/chris_tomlinson/

For the feckless, losing a wallet used to be as bad as it got, but in the modern digital age, losing a phone is now so, so, so much worse. We rely on our little digital assistants so heavily that life is all but over when the DIY body frisk proves fruitless.

But even assuming you have a recent backup and can get a replacement quickly, your problems might not be over if you phone falls into the wrong hands.

A recent project run by security firm, Symantec, deliberately “lost” 50 smartphones in cities throughout the US, each installed with tracking and logging software to see what would happen.

To spice up the honey trap, the phones had online banking Apps installed, folders labelled “private photo” and other clearly personal data, most importantly the information to contact the “rightful” owner was apparent.

Depending on how strong your faith in humanity is and given that the devices themselves were worth a few quid, you might be surprised to hear that 50 per cent of the finders offered to return the phone!

It seems the belief in ‘gadget karma’ (return a gadget and your lost gadget will be returned to you) is strong in the States, but it is what happened to the phones before they were return that reveals the true extent of human curiosity.

Over 50 per cent of finders accessed the online banking information and fired up social networking Apps.  Private photos where accessed by 57 per cent and over all 89 per cent of finders clicked on something that shouldn’t have!

Now here is the dilemma, if you lock your smartphone with a PIN, thus protecting your information, you are preventing the finder from finding your contact info and reducing the chances of its return!

If, like me, you are in the habit of regularly misplacing your phone, there are Apps that will locate it for you, assuming it is still turned on. The ‘Find my iPhone’ App will even allow you to access/delete data on the phone remotely from your laptop if you suspect it has fallen into bad hands.

A less high tech solution, but effective in my case, is to attach it to your neck with string!

The news was first tweeted by @ajaDiorNavy, with a mere 14 followers at the time, who’s “Aunt Tiffany”, an employee of Whitney’s, found the diva dead in her bath.  An hour later it had been re-tweeted 2.5m times.

Aja now has 771 followers, but I can’t see her keeping many of them for long unless her Aunt gets a similar job. It does prove, however, that good content has always been the key to building a Twitter following, or as it turns out, a relative in the right places.

It’s not the first time Twitter has been the first on the news scene. Most recently “Helicopters over Abbottabad at 1am (is a rare event)” was tweeted by a local resident as US special forces assaulted Bin Laden’s compound. If only Osama had been following the right tweeters, he might have escaped.

The US government knows that social media monitoring is a vital part of modern intelligence gathering.  No doubt they have hundreds of spooks sifting through millions of Twitter and Facebook posts by anyone with a foreign sounding name!

But to remove any doubt, last week saw the FBI formally request tenders from social media software developers to produce an application to help them identify emerging threats by analysing social media channels.

No doubt the resulting outrage by privacy campaigners will be ignored in the interests of national security.  However, it must be pointed out that unless Facebook and other closed social networks (ones where only ‘friends’ can see posts) are complicit to the intrusion, this shouldn’t be a problem.

However, if you use Twitter (an open network) you should know by now that everyone can find and see your posts.

Now also you know that Uncle Sam, not known for his understanding of British humour, is also listening, you may want to curb the terrorist banter, unless you fancy a navy seal abseiling in through your living room window some time soon.

Tradition dictates, in my last missive of the year, that I review the technology predictions I made in my first post of January. Unfortunately, it seems to have been deleted, so I’ll have to stick to what actually happened instead!

2011 will go down as the Arab Spring, but also as the year when social media was first used to effect social change.  More importantly, pulling the plug on Facebook and Twitter proved impossible with mobile access to social networks now widespread.

The pen has always been mightier than the sword, but it turns out SmartPhones are now to the tool of choice for starting a revolution!

This year also saw the number of phones running Google’s Android software surpassing the number of iPhones in the world.  I wonder if Google knew Android would turn into the digital equivalent of the AK47.

2011 also saw the Blackberry become the looters’ weapon of choice! Not the business tool image RIM (its owners) were after, but I guess you’ve got to roll with it sometimes.  I’m thinking new ad campaign, targeting community service centres and penile institutions.  As some social media guru once said:  “consumers now control brand image, not brands”.

In 2011 Twitter made a mockery of the footballers’ best friend, the Super Injunction, turning a former sports personality of the year into a philander and stealing the food from the legal professions’ table, who charge £50K to take one out!

Sadly 2011 saw the passing of Steve Jobs, or ‘The Messiah’, as we Apple fans called him.  I did meet him once in California, we talked about the world’s need for a MP3 player that was also a phone – but he never credited me for the idea.

And most importantly 2011 was the year ICANN released the adult top level domain .XXX, to shed light on the darker corners of the Internet.  So no more blaming Google gaffs for dodgy web sites in your browser history!

Although instigated by a comic, the now annual event has gained some resonance.

I, for one, am old enough to recall the real meaning of the word “friend” and know that having any more than six real friends is a right pain.

Before email, mobiles and social networks, friends were really high maintenance. Organising nights out, drinking with them on regularly basis, then in later life, having them round for dinner, pretending you liked their new spouse and remembering the names of their kids etc. was a commitment best not duplicated above double figures.

I’d actually postulate that the number of real friends a person can maintain is a function of their liver’s capacity to regenerate. The average Facebooker has 130 ‘friends’  - which is clearly beyond the capacity or the any human renal organ.

Facebook knows this too and has created functions to allow us to separate friends, acquaintances and people we don’t actually recall meeting.

You can ‘unsubscribe’ people from your newsfeeds and effectively never hear from them again, save the embarrassment of ‘unfriending’. I call this “tidying up my Facebook newsfeed” which should indeed be an annual event for everyone.

Unfortunately, I’ve fallen behind with Twitter.  The noise from those I’ve politely “Followed” back is completely blocking out the tweets from those I want to read.

As a rule, I need to unfollow anyone who tweets about food more than once. I have a similar intolerance to Tweets of babies and allegedly cute pet pictures.  But mainly people who don’t consider their wider audience and Tweet about things irrelevant to me – like how great their social life is (see six friend rule above).

I’d like to suggest a simple solution called “Unfollow Friday” (#UFF).

Traditionally Friday has been the day to recommend Tweeters, (#FollowFriday or #FF for short).  However using the #UFF tag we can collectively remove the boring, the unfunny and the self-deluded, from our timelines for the collective good of Twitter.

Ever wondered what happens to your Facebook profile when you die?’

Don’t worry, I’m in good health, my morbid fascination is prompted by Facebook’s, soon to be released ‘TimeLine’ feature, currently in Beta.

TimeLine produces a sort of scrapbook of everything that has happened to you since you joined Facebook, at the press of a button.

To see a chronology of your life, automatically generated, is a spooky reminder of just how much data is kept about our online activity and is more than a bit creepy.

Prior to the invention of social media, you needed to write an actual book to leave a lasting mark on the records of humanity. But now we all leave digital footprints online that may last longer than those left by the dinosaurs in the prehistoric mud!

Not just active social media users either. I’d bet that everyone alive today, with or without their knowledge, appears somewhere or other in a YouTube clip or uploaded photograph.

And every columnist or a blogger who pens an opinion, however misguided, is now digitally entombed with their words.  In fact, if you are reading this online and its 2050, I’ve just proved my point from the grave!

Even when you ‘checked-out’ for the last time your digital assets can still be of value.  You could have a cool domain name or a following on Twitter large enough to be of commercial interest!

As a member of the .com generation and likely to kick the e-bucket first, I may need to consider this in my will. Who will I leave my Avatar to and who will inherit my eBay sellers rating?

More importantly, how will I change my Facebook status to “dead” after the event, assuming there is no WiFi access where I’m going?

Turns out Facebook will do it for me on request from my next of kin. After seeing the paperwork (proving someone is dead is still an offline process) they will “memorialise” my profile.  This means only existing ‘friends’ can read and post eulogies to my Wall, and presumably be able to see my TimeLine; a lasting epitaph, of every ‘like’, LOL and OMG I ever posted.

One month after its launch and still no invite to join Google Plus!

Its hard to believe, I know, that a key online influencer like me has been left out of the party, but it seems I’m persona non grata at Google.

Google’s latest attempt at creating a social network to rival Facebook appears to be off to a flying start with 25m users signed up so far – yet no one has thought to invite me!

Apparently Lady Gaga is on there along with Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Oprah Winfrey and even William Shatner who is presumably now exploring cyberspace, the final frontier.

The G+ project as it’s known, is currently an invite-only social network. Only people already on G+ can invite others to join which, by accident or genius, has turned into a brilliant marketing ploy.

Google’s last two attempts to create a social network, Wave and Buzz, petered out quickly, some say through lack of truly innovative features. However, Google has worked out that “celebrity acquisition” is key to success this time.

But which of the celebs already acquired are actually posting for themselves or indeed phony? I’ve been told that Jesus Christ turned up as a user, prompting Google to only allow real names on the network, although it’s not clear how they will be validated (It’s notoriously hard to prove you’re the messiah).

At this point I would have liked to review the network itself; its clever friend Circles, Hangout and Huddle concepts designed to make our online social lives easier – but as you now know, I’m NFI, and have no access.

Weather G+ succeeds in toppling Facebook, without my help, is yet to be decided. Facebook took 3 years to reach 25m users, Twitter took only 30 months, yet despite being invite-only G+ has passed this milestone in a few short weeks and could be here to stay.

So if you are one of the chosen few, I’d really appreciate an invite?

Sadly my newfound popularity cannot be attributed to increase in wealth or influence or in deed cosmetic surgery but a recent resurgence of the business networking website.

Usually, when LinkedIn informs me someone has updated their profile, I assume they are looking for a new job, but now it seems people are discovered the wealth of business opportunity LinkedIn can provide and have other reasons for optimising their profiles.

LinkedIn has actually been around longer than Facebook and Twitter but never made it big until now.

This, in part, is due to a raft of new features that mirror the most popular functions of the other big social networks.  For instance you can now “post” statuses, like you can on Facebook  and  “follow” people and companies like you can on Twitter.

It could be that the current surge in LinkedIn usage is down to the publicity surrounding its successful float last May or perhaps LinkedIn has finally managed to appeal to a the raft of diehard tie wearing social media marketing sceptics.

Most business people are now convinced that social media marketing can work for brands targeting consumers (B2C), but few consider it as an effective B2B marketing channel – until now that is.

However “in-bound” marketing strategies are now all the rage (as is the term) and being found on LinkedIn is central to most of them.

Interestingly, as LinkedIn usage rockets Facebook usage is plateauing. Which should come as a surprise given saturation had to come sooner or later in the US and UK, but Facebook wouldn’t be the first social network to have its bubble burst by mass migration.

It could be that social networkers have just matured or perhaps it just my peers and I that are getting too old for Facebook. Its often been said that cool kids don’t want to be on the same social networks as their parents. Perhaps it parents now, who don’t want that either!

I have since been to confession at the Birmingham Apple store to be absolved of my guilt.

A “fondleslab”, for those not down with the kids, describes any portable touch screen device so beloved by its owner that it is incessantly fondled in public.

I swapped the faithful fag packet and lighter combination (which served a similar social purpose) for an iPhone a few years ago, but now, to keep down with the kids, I need an iPad 2.

But it occurred to me that my unquestioned loyalty to Apple needed questioning.

Why did I want to pay over the odds for a hard-to-get-hold-of tablet when there were a plethora of cheaper Android alternatives on the market?

Android is an open source mobile software platform donated by Google to the smartphone world, now adopted by most major phone manufacturers.

The more cynical looked for an ulterior motive than altruism and found one when it was discovered that Android allowed phones to be track via the WiFi connections they made and helped Google to deliver location-based advertising services.

It is reported that if you have an Android phone, Google knows where you are to within 89 feet of where you are sat.

Then it turns out that my iPhone was recording the same location data (for Apple’s own permission-based location services) and due to a bug, anyone clever enough could access a year’s worth of my movements.

Of course the platform with the better social media applications will be triumphant – you knew the S&M word would have to popup sooner or later, didn’t you?

Some surveys report that more than 50 per cent of social networking is now done on the move and the take-up of mobile-specific features such as FourSquare and Facebook “check-ins” suggest few have a problem divulging their location.

I understand this is an exciting development for brands wanting to engage in context of location, but personally don’t want anyone to know were I’m when I’m fondling a slab.