‘I spotted a gap in advertising’: How one student hatched a quirky internet venture to pay his fees

By Liz Lightfoot – Independent

A student living on £100 a month in London has found an ingenious way to fund himself through an MBA course. Whereas most people work for a few years to gain experience and save money before embarking on the prestigious Masters degree, Spyros Pyrgiotis, 24, is in a hurry to gain the qualification he hopes will give him the skills to found a business. He plans to be the youngest to enrol on the MBA course at Kingston University’s business school and is in a race against time because he needs to find the £17,000 fees by September.

With jobs scarce in the recession and banks unwilling to lend, he decided to start an internet venture on his laptop. From a gloomy room in a dilapidated, shared house in north London, he set up an advertising business which has already raised £3,500 in two months.

Pyrgiotis, from the Greek island of Samos, admits his idea is unsophisticated, but says it “does the trick”. He has devised what he claims is the only page on the internet made up solely of text characters which when bought by advertisers change colour and turn into links to their sites.

He charges $2 – or around £1.25 – for each letter which makes up the name of the company or its slogan, a one-off charge which will secure the slot for three years. He quotes prices in dollars because he runs two pages, one for the UK and Europe and the other for the US and the rest of the world.

So far, so good. But with no other attractions offered, who would be likely to find www.thetextpage.com? Luckily for the student, his enterprising girlfriend, Liana Stewart, turned to Facebook and generated a following of 1,200 friends. She has also drummed up interest through mentions on obscure internet pages.

“Spyros told me he had found a way to raise £17,000 in time for September and I didn’t believe him,” says Liana.

“He wouldn’t tell me what it was saying. I would have to guess. I asked friends on Facebook, the social networking site, for some ideas and they came up with all kinds of things, such as selling a kidney, buying lottery tickets or asking people to donate £1 to a fund,” she said.

“When he told me, I was a bit disappointed, to be honest, because I didn’t understand it, but the idea has really taken off.”

Pyrgiotis’s first degree is in the recording arts, and he believes he needs an established business qualification to help him to start up a music production business.

“I came up with the idea after I found no help from banks or student finance organisations,” he said. “I’ve spotted a gap in online advertising in which people pay per character they occupy rather than by click or impression. The internet is dominated by links rather than display advertising, but a link is not always an advertisement because it can also be information.

“Advertisers like it because it is unique and quirky so it grabs attention, but also because it is very, very cheap for a long period of time,” he says. “Instead of paying for each click online, advertisers pay per character.”

Niche companies, student organisations and start-ups trying out different logos have so far got involved in the page.

Pyrgiotis’s undergraduate degree was with the School of Audio Engineering (SAE), delivered through universities in Athens and London. He came to England for the third year which the SAE runs in collaboration with Middlesex University. His retired parents who live off the land in Samos, the Dodecanese island where Pythagoras was born, sent him money for rent.

“It was very hard at first, because I didn’t get support from the SAE or Middlesex and I couldn’t open a bank account because my landlord wouldn’t give me any proof of residence,” said Pyrgiotis, who has since moved to west London.

“I’ve been doing some freelance work as a sound engineer, but if I want to realise my dream of founding a company then I will need to have the business training, which is why I am determined to raise the money for an MBA,” he said. “I thought I would come up with a new business idea – after all, I’ve signed up to a business course.”

Other – more conventional – ways to bankroll your course

On average, MBAs cost around £50,000 once course fees and living costs have been taken into account – this can be a lot more at the top business schools – and if you opt for a full-time degree you’ll also lose your income.

Company sponsorship

According to Jeanette Purcell, chief executive of the Association of MBAs (AMBA), around 50 to 60 per cent of MBA students fund their course by persuading their employers to cover the fees. This is especially popular in part-time courses where students can continue to work as they learn, but it’s also possible to enrol on a full-time MBA and still receive funding.

In this case, you’ll probably be asked to fulfil some conditions set by your employer. These range from a commitment to do your dissertation in an area they are interested in to pledging to work for them for a certain number of years after graduating. All you need to do is persuade them you are worth the investment.

Purcell says: “For most employers, what you need to do is to present some kind of business plan to gain their support, detailing what they’re going to get back and what you can commit to as a result of getting your MBA.”

The only problem with this approach is that some employers might be reluctant to shell out money in the current economic climate. In that case, a loan could be worth considering.

Loans

AMBA has its own preferential loan scheme with a low rate of interest open to any UK-based student accepted on one of its accredited MBAs. The scheme, operated in association with NatWest, will usually cover the course fee and living expenses, but has to be paid back within three years of graduation. Before the credit crunch, banks were willing to lend money fairly readily, viewing their loans as a solid investment that would propel students towards high earnings. It is harder now, but still worth a try. Some business schools also operate lending schemes with preferential rates for students.

The part-time option

The MBA was traditionally a full-time degree, but increasingly it has become available in different modes, offering students greater flexibility. A full-time MBA is still the most expensive way to do it, as you’re giving up your salary and paying the hefty fees over a relatively short period of time.

“Distance learning, part-time and modular programmes offer students a chance to phase the cost over a longer period and also continue working while they study,” says Purcell. “So if cost is a real issue, they should definitely consider different modes of study.”

Scholarships and grants

Most business schools have some sort of bursary scheme. These are worth applying for. Some offer scholarships aimed at women or other groups under-represented on MBAs, but others can be gained through old-fashioned academic excellence. In general, if you can prove you’re likely to excel on the course you stand a good chance of receiving some sort of funding.

Manchester Metropolitan University Business School offers scholarships to self-funded students on its full-time and part-time courses. The university also provides support by setting up payment plans in agreement with the students, to help spread the financial burden.

Newcastle Business School offers a number of £1,000 bursaries, awarded during the application process, and based on an individual’s academic achievement and work experience.

Chris Green

Rhodri Marsden: Is it impossible to delete old information on the internet?

Cyberclinic

One particularly unhelpful way to think about the internet is to liken it to a public noticeboard. If you pen a piece of sickeningly soppy poetry and make the questionable decision to pin it up in public, you can always take it down as soon as you realise your error. But the internet doesn’t work that way. Your embarrassing verse can become a self-replicating personal catastrophe, spread around thousands of hard disks as a reminder to the world that you “wuv your ickle kitten”.

We’ve all posted things online without thinking, but you really need luck on your side to get the genie back in the bottle. You can find deleted web pages in the cache of search engines like Google; the Wayback Machine at archive.org is a repository of web content from yesteryear that we’d rather we hadn’t created; Usenet, once a hive of opinionated discussion, has all its posts archived at Google Groups to remind you of the pointless bickering you once induldged in; and snippets of blog posts you wish you hadn’t made can circulate around the net in RSS feeds long after the blog post itself has been deleted. Indeed, Nokia blogged a little too hastily about the launch of their mobile app store last week and then tried unsuccesfully to delete all trace of it, which at least goes to show that we can all make mistakes. Of course, none of these web services set out to undermine us – they can be fantastically useful resources – but they can double up as sources of shame and regret.

Social networking sites, with their constant badgering to share our thoughts and images with the world, can make it particularly hard for us to purge unwanted material from their system. Researchers at Cambridge University have long been critical of Facebook’s policies that hoard our data against our will, and they noticed a few days ago that personal photographs still seem to hang around on Facebook’s servers long after we’ve tried to delete them. More worrying, perhaps, is the ability to use sites like tweleted.com to easily browse Twitter posts that users have accidentally made and then deliberately tried to delete. It’s always worth keeping in mind when publishing online that the internet’s a wild beast you can’t control: stuff you’re desperately looking for will be impossible to find, while the things you dearly wish would disappear forever will be stubbornly, embarrassingly visible.

Facebook backs down over breast cancer photos

By Margaret Davis, Press Association

Social networking site Facebook backed down after removing pictures of a woman who had undergone surgery for breast cancer.

Sharon Adams, 45, from Slough, posted photographs of herself after she had a mastectomy.

She said on her Facebook page: “I am putting my pictures on here to hopefully raise awareness of breast cancer, women should check themselves weekly for any changes to their breasts.

“It doesn’t mean if you feel a lump that it is cancer, but if it is the sooner it’s diagnosed the better. After having a mastectomy you can have reconstruction if wanted.

“I will be posting pictures of myself on here as I go through each stage. I’m choosing to have my other breast removed as a precaution in the near future after the chemotherapy. I may or may not have reconstruction, I’m not sure yet.”

The removal of the photographs sparked a campaign to have them reinstated.

Organiser Tracey Lang said she started the group because her aunt died from cancer at the age of 42, and one of her oldest friends has only a year to live because of the disease.

She said: “I thought it was brilliant what she was doing, raising breast cancer awareness is very important to me.

“I applaud Sharon for what she is doing, it should never have been removed from Facebook in the first place. I’m glad that they had a rethink.”

A message from spokesman Simon Axten has been posted on the group’s page, explaining that a mistake had been made and that Miss Adams was “encouraged” to replace the photos.

He said: “We’ve investigated this further and determined that we made a mistake in removing these photos. Our User Operations team reviews thousands of reported photos a day and may occasionally remove something that doesn’t actually violate our policies. This is what happened here. We apologise for the mistake and encourage Sharon to upload these photos again if she so chooses.”

The photos are now back on Facebook after the site realised the error around a week ago.

Google launches new free social media tool

AP

Google is hatching a new species of email and instant messaging, but the internet search leader first wants the hybrid service to evolve even more with the help of independent computer programmers.

The free tool, called Google Wave, runs in a web browser and combines elements of email, instant messaging, wikis and photo sharing in an effort to make online communication more dynamic.

Google hopes Wave simplifies the way people collaborate on projects or exchange opinions about specific topics.

Google offered the first glimpse of its latest offering during the Mountain View, California-based company’s annual conference for software developers who build programs on top of its services.

The rest of the web-surfing public won’t be able to hop on Google Wave until later in the year.

By the time Wave rolls out for everyone, Google hopes independent programmers will have found new ways to use the service.

Among other things, Google is counting on outsiders to figure out how to weave Wave into the popular internet communications service Twitter, social networks like Facebook and existing web-based email services, said Lars Rasmussen, a Google engineering manager.

Rasmussen and his brother, Jens, helped build Google’s online mapping service, which sprouted a variety of unforeseen uses after its 2005 debut because of the ingenuity of external programmers.

Having learned their lesson from the mapping experience, the Rasmussens wanted to give developers ample time to tinker with their newest creation before unleashing it on the rest of the world.

The Rasmussens broke away from Google’s mapping service in 2006 to concentrate on building a service that would enable email and instant messaging to embrace the web’s increasingly social nature. They contend email hasn’t changed that much since its invention during the 1960s.

“We started out by saying to ourselves, ‘What might email look like if it had been invented today?’” said Lars Rasmussen, who worked on Wave in Australia with his brother and just three other Google employees.

Wave is designed to make it easier to converse over email by providing tools to highlight particular parts of the written conversation.

In instant messages, participants can see what everyone else is writing as they type, unless they choose a privacy control. Photos and other online applications known as “widgets” also can be transplanted into the service.

The service could easily accommodate advertising like Google’s five-year-old email service already does, but Lars Rasmussen said it’s still too early to predict how the company might profit from Wave.

Battle of social-networking sites

The Independent

Nick Clark: Facebook’s value has fallen a third in 18 months and many of its rivals are also struggling – but not all. Who’s up and who’s down?

Facebook: Down

Mark Zuckerberg, the 25-year-old chief executive of Facebook, this week spoke of his delight at securing a $200m investment from Russian group DST. He was unconcerned that the stake valued the company at $10bn, a third lower than 18 months ago, and said the cash injection would help investment for the future. The social-networking site is still growing at a huge rate, but this latest cash injection fuelled concerns that the firm hasn’t found an effective way to make its users pay. There are now over 200 million Facebookers, with 70 per cent of those outside the US. It had 29.2 million users in the UK last month, up 9 per cent year on year, according to marketing communications analyst ComScore.

The drop in valuation tracks the wider market, where Google’s share price has dropped over a third in the downturn. Yet Mr Zuckerberg’s dislike of banner advertising and a fall in the general ad market will put pressure on a company whose burn-through rate has been estimated at above $100m a year. The group’s CPM, the cost an advertiser pays for every thousand views, is in cents rather than dollars. Dan Cryan, senior analyst at Screen Digest, said: “Facebook is pretty much a communication tool, but the ad tolerance from consumers for such sites is not particularly high.” The group is building its self-service advertising system and eMarketer estimated ad revenues would be $230m this year.

Facebook says ad revenues will be up 70 per cent this year, but as its cost base grows and click price falls it could face pressure. The site is yet to turn a profit, but Zuckerberg did say it would be cash positive next year. Adam Daum, research vice-president of Gartner, said: “In terms of reach and audience engagement, they’re doing a fantastic job. In terms of making the thing pay, they have been struggling somewhat.”

MySpace: Down

Analysts have warned that MySpace profits face severe pressure over the next 12 months. Users are falling, ad revenues are subject to the wider market decline, and the end of a lucrative ad deal looms.

The group, which was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for $580m in 2005, has marketed itself as a social portal rather than a social-networking tool, as users upload content including music and videos. “Users are more tolerant of advertising in this context, and it should be easier to monetise,” Mr Cryan said. He added that MySpace’s tactics has been to set up local offices, to focus on local advertising sales, which has proved successful. Yet its advertising revenues will fall 15 per cent to $495m, eMarketer said, and advertisers will be paying close attention to the slide in user numbers, which could well intensify. Unique users were down 18 per cent in the UK last month to 6.9 million from 8.4 million the previous year. It has also declined by a million in the US to 63.2 million.

MySpace is understood to be in profit and generated over $800m in revenues last year, but this could change, especially as the company’s costs have been estimated to run at $500m a year. One expert said the site’s returns were propped up by a three-year advertising deal with Google worth $900m, which comes to an end in 2010. “It is profitable today but could struggle to maintain its profits as Google has said it doesn’t intend to renew the contract,” Mr Daum of Gartner said.

He added that MySpace could look at charging for certain content such as downloading songs or videos through the site, or even allowing other retailers to set up sales links to sell goods.

Friends Reunited: Down

Friends Reunited has gone from trail-blazing social-networking site to an also-ran in only 10 years. ComScore found that the group lost almost a quarter of its unique users in the past year, falling to a total of 1.8 million in April.

The future is uncertain for the flagging brand, as parent company ITV looks to sell it just over three years after it paid £175m for the site. While the auction has attracted some interest from buyers, the broadcaster is unlikely to recoup much more than £40m.

Friends was started by husband-and-wife team Steve and Julie Pankhurst in 1999. The site used a subscription model and flourished before free-to-use rivals started cannibalising the business. The group admitted defeat cutting the subscription last year, but the site has never fully recovered.

Hi5: Up

Hi5 may be relatively unknown in the UK but it is still more popular than recognisable sites such as LinkedIn; although it has found user numbers declining a fifth in the past year.

The San Francisco-based group fared better in its home market, rising a third to 3.5 million users, but its real strength comes in its appeal to its Latin American audience.

Hi5 was founded in 2003, following a seed capital investment of $250m, and was profitable in its first year. It then raised $20m from Mohr Davidow Ventures in July 2007 to boost its size. It was the first site to tailor content according to the country of its users – 80 per cent of its audience is outside the US – with translations into over 40 languages and dialects. It has been especially successful in Spanish-speaking markets. The group’s revenue stream comes from partnerships in local jurisdictions and targeted advertising.

Twitter: Up

Twitter has made the most noise in the social-networking industry this year. In April 2008 it had 62,000 unique users in the UK, which has soared almost 40-fold to 2.4 million this April. Tweeting has also taken off in the US, rising from 479,000 unique users to 15.7 million, as people express themselves in no more than 140 characters.

The problem for the business is the lack of a revenue stream at the moment; and the founders have been reticent to sketch out the details of their business plans. The firm’s co-chief executives, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, have admitted that it is not the best tool for advertising revenues, and so far have decided not to plaster the site with banner adverts. “I think it’s probably the least interesting thing we could do,” Mr Williams said yesterday. They think that targeting businesses is the way to generate profits. The company is planning to launch tools aimed at corporate clients later this year but details remain at a premium. “Twitter has been enjoying its place in the sun, although the long-term profitability is less clear,” Screen Digest’s Dan Cryan said. The group is still in its infancy. It has 46 employees, and said it is just getting going. It has repeatedly said it is not for sale, after turning down an offer from Facebook last year. The $35m funding it secured this year has also given it breathing room.

Adam Daum at Gartner noted other potential business models. “The sites could offer themselves to businesses as a research tool, relaying what users were saying about their products, and general insights, although that could raise privacy issues.” He said that Twitter could also license its technology to businesses, should they want to develop their own internal social “intranet”.

The group has another problem beyond its lack of revenues, in that many of its new users give up on the site within a month. Nielsen Online found that 60 per cent of new users were not using the site the following month.

Linkedin: Up

Linkedin is smaller than many of its rivals here, but it boasts one benefit the others can’t: a captive audience of business professionals. The group has private equity backing after a consortium including Bain Capital took a 5 per cent stake which valued the group at $1bn.

ComScore’s latest figures show that the unique users have more than doubled in the past year to 880,000 in the UK. It has a model of charging for premium parts of the site. Users can sign up for free, but for certain professionals, such as head-hunters who use the service, a fee is charged.

The group, which is also based in California, said it has 41 million members worldwide, and its members include executives from every single Fortune 500 company.

Adam Daum at Gartner said the model worked because the group must benefit from better advertising revenues than its rivals. “The advertising rates should be dramatically higher than a generic network, because of the professionals who will see the adverts on the site,” he said.

LinkedIn has prospered during the credit crunch in terms of users, partly because those who have lost their jobs see it as a good way to get their CVs in front of potential employers. It is run by Reid Hoffman, an entrepreneur who has invested in Facebook and Digg in the past.

Bebo: Down

Bebo has shrunk more than any of its major rivals in the UK over the past year. The network’s users have fallen from 12 million in April 2008 to 9.1 million last month. This is bad news for a site that has done well this side of the Atlantic, but struggled against the bigger players in the US. It has more than doubled its American users in a year, but at 9 million, lags in fifth.

This is despite the prominence of parent company AOL in the US, which bought the group for $850m last year. Bebo has styled itself as a social portal similar to MySpace. The problem, some industry experts warned, has been knocking the incumbent off its perch.

Bebo was targeted at a specific demographic, mainly 13- to 19-year-olds, “which doesn’t appeal to all advertisers,” Mr Daum said. However, Bebo is hoping to broaden its appeal. AOL has not released recent profit numbers for the group, but rumours have dogged the division of underperformance.

As with many of its rivals, Bebo is not expecting revenues to grow in the downturn and is banking on building up its audience

Facebook worth $5bn less as recession bites

By Nick Clark

The Russian investors Digital Sky Technologies (DST) paid $200m (£125m) for a 2 per cent stake in Facebook yesterday, valuing the social networking site at $10bn – or two-thirds of what it was worth 18 months ago.

Facebook, which was founded in 2004 and remains a private company, sold a 1.6 per cent stake to Microsoft in October 2007 for $240m. That investment valued the whole company at $15bn.

The social networking site, which has more than 200 million users, said last night that DST was also looking to buy $100m of stock for existing shareholders. DST will not get a seat on the board.

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, said the deal with Microsoft was part of a larger partnership and that it had been signed at the “absolute peak of the market”.

The company said the value of the company had fallen because of “changes in the economy” which was in line with the rest of the market. The move to raise cash is part of a plan to fund growth, and Mr Zuckerberg pointed out that the company did not have to raise the extra money.

Facebook said it had been approached by “a number of firms” over a potential cash injection but had chosen DST, a Russian group that specialises in internet investments, because of its “global perspective”.

Mr Zuckerberg added that the company was not actively looking for any other investments at this time.

DST is based in Moscow and London. It is the largest investor in Russian-speaking and eastern European markets, but the Facebook stake is its most high profile international move.

Mr Zuckerberg, who started Facebook when he was studying at Harvard University, said yesterday that despite the move to sell the almost 2 per cent stake, the company was in “no rush to go public any time soon”. The group turned down a $1bn takeover attempt from Yahoo in 2006. Mr Zuckerberg added that the company expects to be “cash flow positive” by next year.

‘World’s oldest blogger’, 97, dies in Spain

AP

A Spanish great-grandmother who billed herself as the “world’s oldest blogger” and who gained a global following on the Internet, died today at the age of 97, local officials and reports said.

Maria Amelia Lopez, who was introduced to the world of blogging by one of her grandchildren, used a mix of humour and nostalgia to recall life during the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco and give her take on modern life.

“Today it’s my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog,” she wrote on her first post on amis95.blogspot.com on December 23, 2006.

Her blog quickly soared in popularity after the media reported on it, having seen more than 1.5 million hits, and it earned Lopez a meeting with Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who she openly supported.

In summer, Lopez would write from her seaside home in Muxia in northwestern Spain, where she was born in 1911; and from the Galician farmhouse where she lived with her grandson Daniel during the rest of the year.

Her posts touched on personal health problems, from trips to the doctor to bouts of dizziness, to her opinion on current events; from the violence of the Basque separatists to Iran’s nuclear pretensions.

She blogged sporadically — sometimes once a week, sometimes daily — with the aid of her grandson because cataracts impaired her vision.

In recent months Lopez was increasingly posting video messages on her blog instead of written texts.

In one of her last posts made in February, she enthused about how the “Internet amazes me more and more” after her grandson Daniel introduced her to the social networking site Facebook.

She promptly set up a group on Facebook to defend old people’s rights.

“One day soon I am going to die. All I am really scared of is losing my mind. In the meantime, I’ll carry on,” she said in an interview with Britain’s The Guardian newspaper in September 2007.

Twitter’s latest megastar is a cat

AP

He’s one of the most popular users on Twitter. More than 500,000 follow his growing celebrity, his every adventure and, well, his cat naps.

Meet Sockington. Twitter’s latest star is a microblogging cat who regales more than half a million with his musings on meal time, personal hygiene and the view from the top of the stairs.

Sockington, or “Socks” for short, is the cat of Jason Scott, a 38-year-old computer historian and computer administrator from Walham, Massachusetts. Since late 2007, Scott has been tweeting from Sockington’s perspective – and finding a “Socks Army” of followers. (Many of his followers are pets, too.)

Dogs and cats in social media isn’t anything new. Many have made Facebook pages (there are applications for both “Dogbook” and “Catbook”) and websites for their pets.

The difference on Twitter is that the running thread of Sockington’s feline commentary takes on the dimension of a comic strip. Scott has created a character with a particular voice by tweeting messages from Sockington’s point of view like: “I must say no comment to the whole dining room incident. No questions please.”

“He’s kind of functioning like a ‘Garfield’ comic,” says Scott. “He’s like the 21st century Garfield.”

There’s the risk that a tweeting cat will only further the impression that Twitter is a flash-in-the-pan success in a sea of online time-wasters.

But in a way, Sockington is a parody of Twitter, where even a kitty cat’s life – his daily trips to the litter box, his insignificant household travails – is beamed out to the world.

“Everybody wants this social media bubble. They want something where we’re all chattering so much that we all get rich,” says Scott. “And this cat makes everybody look like fools because he’s got hundreds of thousands of followers. And he doesn’t tend to follow anyone but other animals.”

Scott’s Sockington feed has benefited from being one of the accounts recommended to new Twitter users when they sign up. But the growth of the Socks Army has been gradual over the last year and a half.

Now, it’s starting to potentially generate revenue. T-shirts are for sale with Sockington wisdom printed on them and Scott acknowledges he may one day accept larger, impossible-to-refuse offers to offset his credit-card debt.

“I’m happy that at the heart of it all is a funny little cat, and that’s why all the attention is happening,” says Scott. “There are much worse reasons to get this kind of national attention.”

Diary Of A Fresher: ‘Facebook is an essential part of social life at university’

By David Scripps

My Year 10 English teacher has Facebook. My mum’s kid brother (now middle-aged) has Facebook. Even my grandmother has Facebook, so it’s probably fair to guess that you have Facebook too.

Since Facebook became more granny-friendly a few years ago, it no longer matters whether you’re the kind of person who’s reading this because you’re roughly like me or because you’re roughly like my parents. Still, you adults just don’t do Facebook like we do Facebook. For you it’s a curiosity, a fad, a nice way of letting all 15 of your “friends” know how splendid your holiday in Tunisia was, right? For us, it’s a little different.

Facebook is pretty essential for life at uni. Any university-based play, concert, political campaign or party will inevitably be organised through Facebook. It ensures that a photographic record of your time as a student is thrust into cyberspace for eternity. It’s a neat deterrent against committing a serious crime or becoming famous, for should either occur, every publication can have access to a wealth of drunken pictures of you, should Facebook wish it.

Worse, when you live in student accommodation, it’s very easy to leave yourself open to the modification of your clumsily unguarded page by a friend, most typically involving a status change declaring one’s interest in members of the same sex. Gone, I fear, are the good old days when students put cars on the roofs of prominent buildings when they felt mischievous.

More extreme practices aside, it is delightfully counter-productive to keep Facebook open while slogging through a research essay: watching friends periodically update their statuses, often about their progress through their own essays, makes procrastination seem almost sociable. The more active form of Facebook procrastination, that of looking through the profiles of one’s friends, enemies, and anyone whose profile can be accessed, is known affectionately as Facebook “stalking”.

Being part of a university network makes this particularly fun, as it allows you to see the profiles of most other people at your uni, whether you’re “friends” with them or not.

This can cut both ways of course, with the possibility of the university itself spying on you being particularly disturbing. I’ve never found any direct evidence of this, but I’ve no doubt it happens. I don’t think it’s having double standards to say that, when we do it it’s a bit of fun, but if the uni does it, it crosses a line.

Facebook is also a crucial part of any student’s public persona. Your Facebook will be among the first things anyone who wants to find out more about you will look at, whether they’re a new supervision partner, friends of friends, or even, perhaps, the occasional girl encountered while clubbing. That’s the hope, anyway.

Most people choose either to nail their colours to the mast by making a pristine, classy, detailed profile with several carefully chosen applications, or alternatively keep their page to the bare minimum. I tend towards the latter, though that probably says more about my workload than my social life.

Taking this position to the extreme, someone could opt to not have a Facebook page at all, but that’s way too counter-culture even for me.

Sarkozy adds flirty twist to Facebook

Reuters

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, eager to show himself as a man of the people, has revamped his Facebook networking page with home videos of him flirting and discussing world politics with his wife, Carla.

Sarkozy’s love of sunglasses and big watches earned him the nickname “President Bling-Bling” early on in his presidency, and his marriage to the model-turned-singer continues to keep the gossip columnists busy.

But his new Facebook site aims for a more domestic feel, with a video of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy chatting to a group of women visiting the presidential palace, telling them about her husband’s busy life in admiring tones.

Sarkozy then bursts into the room and kisses his wife, who affectionately strokes his hands and arms for the remainder of the video.

“I’m going to have a visit from the Iraqi prime minister,” Sarkozy says, to which his wife replies: “Brilliant!”

When he leaves, she calls out “Take care, sweetie!”

Another video shows Sarkozy and the first lady cooing over their dogs, possibly inspired by the media frenzy over U.S. President Barack Obama’s dog, Bo.

Revamping the site, which counts more than 96,000 “friends,” was meant to show “the man rather than the head of state,” the president’s office said.

Sarkozy’s previous profile photo showed him in a sombre suit and tie, more in line with traditional French presidential decorum.

The site still runs official communiques, photos and news, all accompanied by the new profile picture of a grinning Sarkozy in a white shirt the top buttons undone.

The new style may also be an attempt to usurp attention from other Facebook sites referring to the president. The site “I bet I can find one million people who hate Nicolas Sarkozy” has more than 200,000 members.