I’ve just taken a look at my posting rate, and being a science nerd I ploted it out on a graph.

( Do you like graphs? )

So what does that mean? Well, clearly my posting rate has been in decline for the past year and working huge amounts of overtime can only be partly responsible (seeing as I’ve never had a problem taking ten minutes to write a post in a break at work). Partly it’s because some of the subjects I posted about before simply aren’t generating an news storues to comment on anymore, and partly because I’m no longer making any regular thematic posts (e.g. the Counting the Cost of War(games) series.

The spikes in the spring of each year are down to the Six Nations/Doctor Who double bill that always gives me some reason to post.

Another day, another social networking site. So, I signed up to Bebo and what do I think?

In looks it’s a classic Web 2.0 site - big chunky navigation, rounded corners, bold colours combined with subtle fades, lots of white space.

Signing up was easy. The profile had just about the right mix between preset fields and flexible fields that you can customise as you like (or cut and paste directly from Facebook, which I cut and pasted more or less directly from LiveJournal and so on…)

But there seems to be a walled garden approach. There’s nowhere on my profile where I can enter the URL of my web site and it lacks the one feature that really sold Facebook to me - the ability to import my blog RSS feed so that I can update my main blog and have the posts appear automatically on my Facebook profile.

There are also far fewer of my friends already signed up than on Facebook, MySpace, Last.FM, LinkedIn or LiveJournal. And no “Also on…” feature that lets me list my membership of all these other network memberships.

Sorry, but my online presence is widespread and diffuse and any site that doesn’t join the party is going to get left out.

So, okay design, good usability, but poor networking. Probably not something I’ll be coming back to regularly.

Very True Mood:  curious