Be Excellent To Each Other

I just watched The Social Network. I liked the bit where Timberlake is in his first scene and the girl has a REALLY nice bottom. The rest of the film is ok too.

I can't remember when I first joined Facebook, I'm on about my third account now. I can't remember when I joined Livejournal either, nor Myspace or anywhere else like that. But all of these were already quite obviously very popular when I finally did join them, even if most people I know irl weren't there before me. Twitter, on the other hand, seemed fairly sparsely populated when I first had a go. It's the closest I've got to the next big thing's big bang.

Question then: Where do we reckon is a good place to hang around online to find out what the next one is? I realise I'm probably asking for the equivalent of the phone number of the girl with the really nice bottom in The Social Network here but it's still an interesting idea to play around with - I can't begin to imagine what the market needs or would bear next, but then I couldn't conceive of microblogging and when i did get into that, I never imagined some middle ground would also work, even if it was just for cats, lesbians and supernatural .gifs with utterly broken communication methods (Tumblr).

So willl it get Dugg to bits before it's Slashdotted, or is an aggregate of sources mentioning something the best indicator? Are any specific journalists likely to call it before most people?

ANSWER ME!

I'd hope Diaspora takes off and is good.

Me too, still waiting

It could probably do with a pronounceable, decent name. Whoever came up with that is rubbish.

Edit: also, their website is confused and confusing. I can't see it getting anywhere, especially given it's evident people don't give much of a fuck about the openness and privacy-respect it's supposed to be standing for.

Glarp is the next big thing. Totally Web 3.0.

You're asking where you'll learn about the next big thing before anyone else? Try joining Reddit. Good things get voted up, quickly. It's like Digg only not fucking awful. Although having said that, it's going down hill ever so slightly, but that opinion may be tinged with "eternal September" style elitism, and is not necessarily my own.

I'm interested as to why Digg is awful whereas Reddit isn't, being as both are the same sort of thing. I've heard many say the same.

I don't think we're ready for the next big thing. An incremental upgrade would be nice. Web 2.2.0.124 would be fine.

I hear myspace is pretty pro.

Friends Reunited. It can't fail from looking at the emails it sends me once a fortnight with a subject header saying "Recent Activity on Friends Reunited" and the email basically contains nothing other than a reminder of by login details!

How much did ITV pay for it again? £120m?

Particularly when you look up it's original meaning, it's like they're hoping Facebook buy it out and shitcan it.

Oh yeah. They should have named it ‘So talk about friends’

Reading their web site, I'm still not 100% sure what it is.

Diaspora is a distributed, secured Twitter clone with less features. It's doomed. People don't care about Open Source on a philosophical level.

The next big thing won't float to the top of something like Reddit until it's already the Current Big Thing. You'd be better off compiling a list of 50-100 blogs of key tech writers, analysts, and devs, and scanning through there. The NBT would certainly be mentioned somewhere in that RSS list very early on, and with a better signal-to-noise ratio than something public like Reddit (but still pretty hopeless, mind).

Digg is awful and basically run by a small number of big news outlets who consistently get voted to the top. Reddit has a lot more variety, plus you can customise what you see on your front page. For example I subscribe to the Food Porn Reddit, which makes me hungry (and horny) on a daily basis.

Fair enough, I'll give Reddit a go.

Digg may suck on the levels you've described but on the occasions I visit it, I read stuff that's interesting.

Does anyone still use Delicious or del.ici.ous? Actually, don't answer that here, I'll split that question to its own thread.

Well anything worth seeing on Digg is inevitably on Reddit as well, but you get a lot of community-made stuff on Reddit as well.

It is worth pointing out that if we were to follow The Web, we'd all be riding segways, eating paper clothes and having dance offs in crowded promenades.

I'm happy for The Web to be a distraction, as opposed to a guiding light.

I always thought that if the Guardian started hyping something on the Internet, it was doomed. Anyone still use 'Second Life', for instance?

(But then I was on sinister Facebook before it was a movie, and still can't see the point of Twitter...)

Hang on - what?

I finally decided to give 'That Second Life type of thing' a go, and seeing a link to the Google run equivalent whilst I was fiddling with my google account settings, registered and started downloading the client.

Went to make a cup of coffee whilst it was on its' way, got back to my laptop to read 2 registration related emails, and a third apologising to all members, they were discontinuing the service and would turn it off overnight.

Rockmelt.

To paraphrase John Gruber, it solves the problem of Chome having a neat interface.

I can't see what Rockmelt does that Flock, StumbleUpon, and other less-than-stellar services don't though.

Bah, I was just hoping it might be something nobody else had heard of yet. I forgot we had Paul Carr a tech blog journalist in the room

Dude, it's been on Lifehacker already!