Brian McCullough - Organizational Internet and Marketing Consultant

There are many news stories going around about internet speeds in the United States losing speed over the next few years due to heightened video usage online. The United States already has some of the slowest Internet speeds among other countries, I would guess that in a line up the US would fall number 8 or 9 behind counties with much faster Internet speeds. I was wrong, see the chart below, the U.S is 15th.

This whole thing about slow Internet speeds came to my attention when I realized that I could not view a new website because my connection was to slow. That website is http://www.thehdweb.com. The site looks interesting and have a nice feel to it, I also noticed that they are working on increasing their website viability with a bunch of lame banner ads, I am almost positive that they are going to be disappointed with the results.. Unfortunately I have tried to use the site in many different locations and yet the site always tells me that my connection is not going to cut it for a full experience. After continuing the site runs ok but lots of buffering time, nonetheless the nice wide screen makes up for it in some ways. Overall it seems like they have had slow growth, Stumbleupon users have given the site one star, they have a ton of inbound links, that does not really mean anything, I would guess that the site is having trouble maintaining users and at that not getting more then 5k a month…ehhh more like 4k users a month.

If you live in many parts of California there is no way that you would be able to utilize the HD web because no Internet service provider would be able to offer it to you. In doing some research I found that Time Wanner Cable does not even list their broadband speeds on their website. I occasionally work in a office out of Los Angeles that says they have a T1 connection and their speeds are completely up and down and can not really use Joost or the Web in HD. When I visited Tulsa, Oklahoma I found that with COX you get the option of under 1MbpsS, 7Mbps or something like 14Mbps, now thats speed. Anyway I will be following this. but for know if where going to waste bandwidth lets get some quality HD site up.

I can still recall the first time I had ever heard of Facebook. I was on a college break in Palm Springs hanging out with a friend from University of San Diego. We where talking about MySpace and she said “…but are you on Facebook?” I was like uh. She went ahead and gave me the tour, I went to sign up and unfortunately my school was not open for registration, many were not. So I put my name and school in the Facebook database and months later was invited.

Back then Facebook was a social network grouping people and schools within a clean interface (unlike MySpace’s GUI) with a ever growing list of new helpful settings, functions, and applications. Unlike it’s competitor, Myspace, Facebook had very little downtime, much less spam and always seemed to have its users in mind. These things and more have set Facebook up to become the multi billion dollar website or as Mark Zuckerberg calls it “Social utility” that it is today.

Today there are tons of social network communities to choose from, trust me I know, I joined about 15 of them over the weekend. I was very impressed that every site had their differences, this made my social network excursion interesting. The biggest downfall, for me, was that once I was signed up I did not know how to start “socially networking”. Many sites wanted me to start by uploading all my email addresses into their database. I do realize that uploading contacts is important for growth, however; only bother me with it once or twice, and not till I do it, after a while this became annoying.

A few of the sites listed their steps of interaction for me, overall they where:

1 Add friends, mainly by uploading your contacts
2. Update you profile information
3. Interact

More Like!

1. Upload Free Leads
2. Fill In Free Targeted Information
3. Help Grow Content to Attract Advertisers

For me I would say that two factors determined which sites where my favorite; first was the look and feel and second was the usefulness. I put a * next to all of networks that satisfied my initial experience.

Sites that I have joined in the past or over the weekend - *favs

Lets see how many I use…