Netbooks are often thought of as just being "little laptops", but that is not the entire story. The rise of these ultraportable machines at a time when mobile broadband was becoming both more affordable and popular has arguably created a much closer relationship between these machines and the Internet, with consumers using them to check up on social networking sites, use web applications such as Google Docs and keep up to date with their email. The physical characteristics of netbooks, such as the small screens, have driven innovation in netbook interfaces up until now, but recently some alternative ideas have begun to surface about what a netbook experience should be like, with new ideas such as making web sites and social updates "first class elements" of your desktop. An interesting example of these new ideas in action is Ubuntu Moblin Remix.

It has been a very interesting year for social networking, microblogging, the practice of sharing short messages with followers has really caught on and Twitter has certainly enjoyed the most buzz of 2008. A notable feature though of Twitter's rise has been the number of problems they have and its bizarre reverse product development cycle, it now has less features than when I first joined; and all in the name of stability, a goal that Twitter is going through a lot of pain to achieve. In the background though has been the looming presence of FriendFeed, a service that aggregates streams from various web 2.0 services and has the ability for users to post comments. It was founded by some former Google employees and has been adding some very interesting features recently such as rooms and real time feeds. That's right - they've been adding features not taking them away! I've noticed FriendFeed is becoming more and more useful to me as it attracts users and it will be interesting to see how this develops in 2009.

On this day last year I wrote my very first blog post, prompted into action by a link from Martin Weller's blog to my then largely empty blog! I'm glad I became a blogger, I've already explained my reasons for blogging and the last year has no doubt seen some quite dramatic changes in the technology world. The blog has come a long way since then and now I am proud to say that on average two to three hundred of you visit it each day. I would like to say a big *thank you* to everybody who has read my posts and taken the time to comment. My fist post was about the Course Profiles application we created that works inside Facebook. Back then we were being told that no student wanted their university to have a presence in Facebook as The Guardian put it:

The world of Web 2.0 consists of many sites that you might use for different purposes, you might use Flickr store your photos, Twitter to microblog, last.fm to find new music, your bookmarks on del.icio.us, maybe a blog of your own, the list could go on for quite some time. In each of these sites you might have a profile that tells part of the story about who you are, but these websites usually keep themselves to themselves, the profile will only reflect your interaction with that site. So different aspects of your Web 2.0 personality can be found scattered all over the Internet, but now it is possible to tie these strands together to enhance your website or blog and give a better impression of the things you find interesting.

The Course Profiles application for Facebook has been praised in a report by Childnet International and funded by Becta, the UK Government body for learning technology. The report's author, Josie Fraser left a message on the forum for Course Profiles to let us know: "I'm delighted to let you know that Course Profiles has been featured in Childnet's Young People and Social Networking Services report ... thank you for providing such a great example". The report covers the use of social networking services by children and young people in education and coverage of its contents (including a link to the full report) can be found on Josie Fraser's blog.

Last week I had the pleasure of being at the SocialLearn workshop held for OU students, staff (including many Associate Lecturers - the vital members of staff who act as learning mentors to students) and alumni to discuss and get input for the SocialLearn project (a next-generation educational social network platform, more information can be found in Martin Weller's slideshow). A few of the participants have already written blog posts describing their experience of the event, Jo Badge asked if this is a new OU philosophy, Nigel Gibson reflected that the event was a chance to "an opportunity to share space with some really imaginative, smart, intelligent, bright, awesomely clever and switched-on people", ok I like that quote I have to admit! Martin Weller reflected on the use of Twitter and how it added an extra dimension to the workshop. I've been working with my OU colleagues Nick Freear and Alex Little to produce some add-on applications for the platform, early forms of which were demonstrated. I also got the chance to run a small spin off workshop (for the first time) to explore scenarios for the use of mobile technology with SocialLearn.

My OU Story

Details coming soon. 

For some time the same team that brought you Course Profiles has been working on another Facebook application for Open University students and staff and now that application has been released, it is My OU Story. The idea of this application is that it provides a place for people to tell their story related to OU studies. They can (through the preferences page) choose to allow the stories they post to be shared with everybody, people in their network, just their friends or even keep the story to themselves. When you post you story you can also record how you are feeling at the time on a mood slider (which I hope you like as it took ages to get right!). Once a person has submitted a few stories you can see how they are feeling over time by having a look at their mood graph. Being a social application through, the interaction is not just one way. If somebody reads your story they can also provide feedback, maybe to say they are happy for you, or on worse days to "hang on in there".

Up to now the computing experience has been divided into two - online and offline. Being online means using sites through a web browser, offline means working with different applications, mostly designed to work with documents not stored on the Internet, but instead on local file systems. However, changes changes in the way we communicate and work are starting to make this arrangement look creaky and old fashioned so thoughts have turned to how to integrate these two worlds.

The Course Profiles application, which allows you to display a badge on your profile in Facebook about your Open University studies has just been updated. This is a bit of an interim release while we plan a brand new user interface that will enable users to connect with the application's features more easily. Not that this is some sort of dull maintenance release though, we've put in some new features!