Last night I played my first game of Rise of Nations for a while against a few of the gamers. Considering that part way through the game I had to deal with our own vomiting feline I thought I did pretty well managing to survive until the end, and being on the winning team – even if my nation was a bit backward…
Then I saw this…
Looks like Howard has been delegating playing responsibilities…
Probably a bit of an indictment of my Rise of Nations skills as well…
Guess I’d better get practising – either that or teach Sophie how to play the game too! 😯
Perhaps the most interesting statistic from the article is that following the publicity about the changes, 20% of users had updated their profile privacy settings.
There are a number of other interesting statistics too:
The UK is the fastest growing market, but unlike the USA it is attracting older users – 54% of UK users are over 25, and over 35’s are the fastest growing group.
Facebook is not the largest social networking site in the UK – currently MySpace and Bebo are bigger. However if the current growth continues Facebook is predicted to pass MySpace this month.
The opening up of the site has radically changed the demographics of the user base – 75% of users are now outside college.
The company has a revised target of 60,000,000 active users worldwide by the end of the year – the original target for the year, already surpassed, was 40,000,000.
The company identify the application platform as being a major growth factor – currently there are 3000 applications available, and apparently 80,000 developers working on the platform.
Anyway, the application platform has given me a way around one of my original annoyances, which was that a number of friends were primarily operating through Facebook and getting grumpy that my profile was largely empty. I’ve still got a largely empty profile – but thanks to a great little WordPress plug-in called Wordbook details of my posts on here are automatically placed into the mini-feed on Facebook. There were a number of variations around for integrating blogs, but this seemed to be the best for me as it was all automatic, plus it didn’t rely on dumping large amounts of my content into Facebook, or my having to manually select posts on the Facebook end to work. Alongside this I’ve also added a feed for my pictures from Flickr – again this is a tool that links back to the original pictures on Flickr rather than dumping all the data onto Facebook
As I spotted on the Facebook mini-feed last night, the rising popularity of Facebook gives you a new exciting way to split up, better even than the e-mail or the text message – just change your status! This conveniently tells both your now ex-lover, and all your friends of the change in one easy action…
I may have baulked at the prospect of my local council spending my taxes on a probably fruitless attempt to stop it, but I’m certainly pleased to hear that Reading has scrapped the loony one way IDR plan. The idea was that turning the whole of the IDR into one giant roundabout would ease traffic congestion in the town, however taking our usage as an example, a trip to almost anywhere in town, like the sorting office, or the station would have resulted in us having to drive a complete circuit around the town centre to get there and back. Currently we only have to use a short stretch of the IDR for most journeys, so making the change would increase the amount of time we would have spent driving around Reading not reduced it. Unfortunately for Reading taxpayers though, their local council has now spent a truckload of money on a totally fruitless exercise – it’s back to the drawing board for how to solve Reading’s traffic problems.
Thoughts from, and the lives of a Canadian and a Brit living in the UK.
