James Osborn

In the old world businesses would make it as difficult as humanly possible for consumers to move from their service to a competitors. This makes economic sense, after all… people are less likely to want to move if it involves effort, if they don’t get the equivalent service elsewhere or if something (such as a [...]

One thing Facebook has learnt in the last few days is the importance of incremental updates rather than one large revolution in design. In a recent survey 94% of Facebook users said they disliked the new site design and Facebook for the first time ever announced that they were listening to users and are going [...]

Affluence.org has been proclaimed ‘Facebook for rich people’. Every niche demographic seem to have their own social network and Affluence.org has been designed for rich people who like to talk to rich people… exclusively. It aims to bring ‘the members-only country club‘ mentality to the web but whilst this may sound like a good business [...]

Remember FriendsReunited? Back in 2000 the UK spin-off of ‘Classmates.com’  in many ways laid the foundation of today’s biggest sites. It had a business model, a growth rate to rival that of Twitter and even made a profit of £22 million in 2007 – something Facebook and MySpace are still struggling to do.  So what [...]

Following on from last week’s theme (but hopefully a little less negative and more constructive). This week is TIOTI.com (tape it off the Internet). The company is a UK based startup and tries to be a more comprehensive wikipedia for TV shows, but with a social networking layer. It started out life with a good [...]

Social networking is a business dominated by trends. There was Bebo, MySpace and now there is Facebook. As Facebook becomes more and more mainstream (as I write it is ranks as the 8th most visited site in the world  and its growth is outstripping MySpace ) people are already beginning to wonder what the next [...]

The Internet is abundant with sites that are bad ideas or badly executed and so I thought it was time to throw my oppinion into the mix and review a few of these sites that I think have potential.The first entrant to the list is *drumroll please*… MeOwns (http://www.meowns.com/). Although this site stands for most [...]