James Hannah

Social net­work­ing has become like, with apolo­gies to Bill Wat­ter­son, Calv­in­ball. Play­ers invent their own rules. And, when some­one comes along and starts impos­ing rules to ‘improve’ the game, play­ers sim­ply relo­cate and cre­ate a totally dif­fer­ent game, and one that prob­a­bly doesn’t even involve a ball.

This was all brought home to me with the news today that ITV is in finan­cial trou­ble, and came hand-in-hand with the curi­ously unset­tling feel­ing of my hav­ing suc­cess­fully pre­dicted some­thing. I don’t have by any means an impres­sive track record as a futurologist.

A cou­ple of years back, ITV bought the Friends Reunited social net­work­ing site. My instant first thought, and doubt­less count­less other people’s instant first thought, was: “Why?”

What a dim-witted acqui­si­tion. It really seemed like the net­work had missed the boat. Sev­eral boats.

Friends Reunited was excit­ing nearly a decade ago, but it had a once-only func­tion: every­one quickly got in touch with any­one they want to be in touch with, and then ITV bought it. Even writ­ing it here, it seems redun­dant to dis­cuss: it’s so obvi­ously wrong.

Com­pare too News Inter­na­tional: no sooner had Rupert Mur­doch snapped up MySpace than the pub­lic appetite evap­o­rated. These days it seems so clunky and incon­ve­nient. [It was even­tu­ally sold off at a reported $500m loss]

But why did it seem so obvi­ous that Friends Reunited was the wrong thing for ITV to invest in? Well, it seems to me that peo­ple have a fun­da­men­tal desire not be sold things. Per­haps more accu­rately, they don’t want to feel like they’re being sold things. It’s self-respect, isn’t it?

And we’ve seen what’s hap­pened with that other News International-related cor­po­ra­tion BSkyB. Someone’s come along, half-inched the foot­ball, pimped it, and sold it back to us. Now it’s a weird-looking sur­gi­cally enhanced bimbo sway­ing around and behav­ing ever more errat­i­cally in an effort to feed its money addic­tion. Mean­while its vital organs are rot­ting away.

It com­forts me to imag­ine that the lat­est gen­er­a­tion of media con­sumers has got wise to this cyn­i­cal pimp­ing, and has rejected it.

Twit­ter is the more con­ve­nient Face­book is the more con­ve­nient MySpace is the more con­ve­nient Friends Reunited.

It’s Calv­in­ball: the gen­eral pub­lic is relo­cat­ing to some­thing else, some­where else, any­where well away from the cor­po­ra­tions. And, until the cor­po­ra­tions come up with a new for­mula, the pub­lic is in the lead, Q points to 12.

j