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Social networking seemed to take over our lives in 2009, acknowledgment to the phenomenal success of two capital players, Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly, the fastest-growing age group on Facebook is people in their thirties. After a few years battling with amusing rivals, in 2009 Facebook definitively drew ahead of the pack. Celebrating its fifth altogether in February, Mark Zuckerberg’s company announced that it had reached 150 million registered users; by September that cardinal had doubled to a behemothic 300 million users.

In ‘09 Facebook managed to upset its users with a site revamp (Facebook’s additional within a year), numerous phishing scams and malware attacks, declared unauthorised charges to gamers’ credit cards, and a backlash over aloofness issues when the site afflicted its user settings. ‘With great power comes great responsibility’ was the tagline for the Spider-Man movie, and with a Facebook film due to reach screens in October 2010, we’d like to suggest the tagline ‘with great popularity comes great disgruntlement’.

“Facebook is not our competition,” Van Natta told the Financial Times. After an April management reshuffle that saw former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta become CEO of the music-heavy amusing network, MySpace announced in October that it was alive focus to concentrate on becoming an online hub for music and entertainment. Faced with its rival’s record user numbers, MySpace finally gave up trying to compete, in spite of its own not-insignificant 130 million or so users.

Although attracting fewer users than other amusing sites (around 45 million), micro-blogging service Twitter really came into its own this year, worming its way into the cultural consciousness on the back of celebrity endorsement, user-generated breaking news, and the presence of most major media outlets. Meanwhile, it seemed like the whole apple fell in adulation with 140-character cachet updates this year. Indeed, halfway through the year Twitter underwent a slight change in direction, moving away from its roots as a networking site and focusing instead on becoming a kind of zeitgeist barometer, showcasing which capacity people around the apple care about through its real-time search engine.

In 2009 these false rumours were merely an annoyance, but with Twitter now partnering with search engines Google and Bing, apprehend affected — and awful — links to become a serious problem for internet users next year. And accustomed the growing prevalence of URL shorteners, will we be able to click with aplomb in 2010?. We saw the dark ancillary of Twitter during the year too, chiefly in the form of malware and denial-of-service attacks, but also through the proliferation of affected news. After the real deaths of celebrities Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon, some users took advantage of Twitter to spread false gossip far and wide. Diddy, Britney Spears and Harrison Ford were among those whose rumoured deaths were, to quote Wilde, greatly exaggerated. Jeff Goldblum, Kanye West, P.

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