The UK’s Channel Five has started putting a special daily news round-up on Myspace. While this has been widely attributed to a desire to hook in the younger demographic the site represents, I can’t help feeling this is just one failing institution reaching out to another in a desperate attempt to save itself from further obscurity. This cringe-worthy promo video featuring Natasha Kaplinsky just about says it all, really:

ITV recently joined Bebo’s OpenMedia project, which makes programmes available online to its members, although that isn’t quite the same as what Five have done – at least Bebo are only showing things they think bored teenagers might potentially watch (like Gossip Girl and Keith Lemon).

When will these people learn that putting things online doesn’t make them better and won’t save them from being rubbish? The internet demands quality content, just like everything else.

Lots of people have expressed disgust at the new Facebook layout, and for a variety of reasons. Some feel it’s a shameless rip-off of twitter, others just think it’s impractical and irritating. Some of these complaints are quite funny. I found this comment on one blog post on this topic:

I just “became a fan” of you on Facebook. But I’ll tell you what I’m not a fan of… The new Facebook layout. It can go swallow some rat poison. IMHO. Of course, I’ve been on Facebook since you used to have to receive an invite from someone else to even be on the thing. So, I guess I’m sort of one-sided on the deal and am un-accepting of the new… But, I don’t have much of choice other than quit using. Naaaaaaah.

Actually, the best response I’ve seen has come from twitter. Someone called Mokokoma commented that “i love the way i hate the new facebook layout – it saves me a lot of time + bandwidth.”

Hilarious. But there’s now a much more serious reason to consider giving social networking sites a miss altogether: the government has plans to try and bring them under the remit of their “intercept modernisation programme” which is already supposed to collate information about email and internet usage.

This has been in the pipeline for a long time; the EU Data Retention Directive which came into being following the June 2005 bombings in London has prompted proposals of this kind for the purposes of monitoring potentially terrorist activity.

Since use of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace has rocketed in the past year or so, the Home Office have now decided to include them in the database’s remit.

However you feel about civil liberties and even without getting into the whole ends versus means discussion, it is still slightly strange to think that the government can know things about your electronic correspondence that you didn’t actively tell them. Strange, and worrying.

If it’s any comfort, the database won’t actually store the contents of your messages. Just when and to whom you send them.

That’s acceptable, right?