Prompt's TechBlog

Facebook? It's okay, I suppose. Myspace? There are worse sites. But good as these sites are, I've always thought they lacked a little... glamour. Many times, I would sit, hunched at a computer, poking a contact on Facebook, and think,

"I wish Kylie Minogue was involved. But I should be so lucky!"

Well start spinning around, because the day has come! The BBC reports that Kylie Minogue has launched her very own social networking site - KylieKonnect. That's right folks - a Kylie themed social networking site, built especially for you. I've had a look at the site and I can say, with a hand on my heart, I wouldn't change a thing.

Joking aside, this social networking launch is just the latest in a seemingly endless series of challenges on the mighty MySpace and the fancy Facebook. Every day it seems as if a new social networking site has been launched - last week it was Saga Zone, a site for the over 50s, now it's this. The word is out that social networking is the next big thing thing and it's never too late to get into the market.

Companies have tried to compete against the big two social networking sites and failed to make an impact on the market. In a response to this, more and more sites are trying to find a niche in the market that they can exploit, and it will be interesting to see these new social networking concepts emerge. Yahoo! for example, are launching Kickstart, a social networking site targeted at young people who are looking for, or starting careers (reported by The Register). Whether this particular tactic draws people away from Facebook and MySpace or not remains to be seen, but on paper at least, its an attractive prospect.

Then there's social networking as a targeted marketing tool. KylieKonnect is unlikely to win record numbers of users, but the fact that it encourages users to register their WAP phones to access content remotely, and sells premium Kylie products means that it could prove to be a nice little moneymaker for the antipodean pop princess.

Does this mean we'll see more music stars getting involved in social networks? If KylieKonnect proves to be a success, then it's not unlikely.
Can't Get You Out Of My Head, On a Night Like This, Locomotion
The social networking boom goes on and on. Thanks to investment and support from the likes of Microsoft and Google, it is unlikely that anything will have an impact on the Big Two. In the last two weeks we have seen new sites launched or revealed that cater to very specific groups of people and I fully expect to see more emerge in the next few weeks.

Will they succeed where others have failed? If anyone can, Kylie can...

Prompt Challenge: Identify all the Kylie singles throughout this post and win... um... a sense of self worth?