TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

UPDATED: Facebook is the Hamptons/Officer Country, MySpace is Los Angeles/Barracks

The BBC today reports on a demographic survey of Facebook and MySpace users conducted by UC Berkeley. Facebook gets snooty sounding college kids coming from well-heeled families; MySpace gets ethnic-Americans, freaks & iconoclasts, and people from less educated and wealthy backgrounds.

From the article:

Broadly, Ms Boyd found Facebook users tend to be white and come from families who are keen for children to get the most out of school and go on to college.

This division is just another way in which technology is mirroring societal values
Danah Boyd Characterising Facebook users she said: “They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.”

By contrast, the average MySpace teenager tendeds to come from families where parents did not go to college, she said.

Ms Boyd also found far more teens from immigrant, Latino and Hispanic families on MySpace as well as many others who are not part of the “dominant high school popularity paradigm”. [from: the BBC]

Well then - Facebook is the squeaky clean quarteback/cheerleader all-American socialnet, and MySpace is the grunge band, hip-hop, lowrider underground.

Implications?

Facebook gets the money. Members with money, heading into moneyed professions, Facebooking the whole way.

MySpace gets the volume. As a catch-all for everyone else, MySpace will continue to lead in membership and usage volume.

Read juicer quotes on Boing Boing, btw.

UPDATE

From the Guardian:

In the paper she also conjectured that a recent decision by the US military to ban service personnel from using sites including MySpace showed evidence of social fissures in the forces.

“A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there’s a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook.” [from: the Guardian]

class, demographics, facebook, myspace social+networking

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The Damaging Focus on Share Price

The recent news that Yahoo and FMI are in talks about MySpace makes me shudder, as does Jerry Yang’s acknowledgement of the “difficult task he faces to arrest the decline in the internet portal’s shares.”

From where I’m sitting, Yahoo’s going about their revitalization backwards already. Google and Apple drive their corporate decision making process with their overall strategies, worrying little about short-term share price effects; Yahoo drives its overall strategy and decision-making with knee jerk reactions to those share prices. Which approach do you think is more likely to lead to long-term success?

That’s why I feel any deal with FMI at this stage would be ill-conceived; its a share-manipulation stunt to give the board something to preen about, not a carefully considered move that fits into a long-term strategy (Apple’s style), or a wild bout of paradigm-shifting creativity (Google’s style).

apple, FMI, google, myspace yahoo

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Facebook Gets It, Becoming the Web OS: Microsoft 2.0

Facebook “gets it” in a way that MySpace, record labels, and countless other technical/social troglodytes don’t: if you own the platform, you own the industry. And if you own the industry, you get a cut of it all.

For background, see: TechCrunch,
CenterNetworks (recap), Fortune, and a million others captured on TechMeme.

Here’s my conjecture:

Facebook wants to be the next Microsoft.

Think about it: Microsoft owned the software platform on which the last 2.5 decades of computing has been done, and has profited ridiculously. Facebook is building the next generation platform - the apocryphal Web OS - by recreating the Microsoft environment from the eighties:

1. Create the platform. (its even called Facebook Platform)
2. Reach out to developers, make it easier or more profitable to build on your platform. (facebook is hitting both of these)
3. Let the users get hooked on apps developed on the platform.
4. Watch the platform spawn a user-driven ecosystem.
5. Keep users isolated; let them see the benefits, not the plumbing. (windows vs. linux?)
6. Profit!

Consider what would have happened in the OS market if Microsoft had restricted MS-DOS to only Microsoft applications, or selectively told large, popular vendors they couldn’t run apps on DOS (hello MYSPACE). The first open alternative would have put MS-DOS in the ground. Note too that this is not a discussion of technical superiority: lord only knows, Microsoft’s code has its issues, and the do-what-you-will approach to developers has caused millions of problems - but the open-ness, and ability for anyone to code anything made it the most approachable for every stakeholder in the PC value chain.

IMHO, Facebook is heading towards the same success and was prescient in turning down Yahoo!.

facebook, microsoft, myspace, platform yahoo

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Twitter Spamming

I saw some referral traffic from Twitter this AM, and went over to see who had Twittered me. At which point, I realized (a) there doesn’t appear to be a way to search Twitter, and (b) Twitter is vulnerable to spamming. Here’s the frontpage that I saw:

Note the “usaid3” posts about Sony buying Microsoft. Breaking news. Can’t see what’s behind the TinyURL. Tempted to click? Well usaid3 wants you to click really bad - its a script that’s bombing the twitter front page, posting the same thing every few seconds:

In the time that it took to write the post, the Twitter being send by usaid3 switched to “Twitter TV” - pointing to the same TinyURL.

Oddly, that TinyURL goes to a defunct MySpace page. Confused? Me too. Looks like a spambot that outlived the page it was trying to drive traffic too.

Of course, I don’t imagine too many regular Twitter users are hanging out on the front page. That being said, it still seems odd that Twitter doesn’t appear to have any anti-spam measures in place - I can’t imagine a much clearer spam flag than the same thing being posted from the same account identically hundreds of times every few minutes.

Perhaps Twitter should write a hook into Akismet, or validate posting IP’s against http:BL. Doesn’t seem like rocket science to me.

myspace, spam twitter

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Rolling Stone Social Network: Born to gather moss

Om lets us know that Rolling Stone Magazine is creating a social network. So - a sixties brand with little relevance to the social-networking MySpace & FaceBook generation is attempting to gloss a layer of hipness over their decaying empire: I don’t see much good coming from this.

Rolling Stone has two options:

1. CURRENT PLAN = BAD IDEA: Increase brand penetration in their traditional target demographic: the 30+ aging hipsters crowd is where Rolling Stone finds its readership. By launching their own social network, they are taking on the challenge of converting this demographic - which has largely ignored the phenomenon - into social networkers. Whatever gains they expect to get in brand awareness, online presence, or physical circulation will be challenging to come by in a conceptually hostile market segment.
2. Increase brand penetration in new demographics: If Rolling Stone really wants to expand into the burgeoning, music-obsessed youth/college market, they should go where they go: FaceBook and MySpace. Create a co-branded special content area and/or group membership features around the Rolling Stone brand and content.

This whole thing looks like CEO “Gotta Have It” effect, sold up by hyperbolic consultants. Time for Rolling Stone to pause and re-think.

facebook, gigaom, myspace, rolling stone, rollingstone, social social networking

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MySpace to PhotoBucket: Buh-bye

Fox Interactive Media dropped the bomb on PhotoBucket and has banned PhotoBucket videos on MySpace.

• TechCrunch speculates that the timing may not be coincidental - that Fox may be trying to run a spoiler on a forthcoming PhotoBucket sale.
• HipMojo suggests that FIM is trying to prevent the rise of the next YouTube and protect their own nascent MySpace Video product.
• Scobelizer tells it like it is: if you use a free service, don’t expect to be able to do everything you want. If you want to have complete control, roll your own - its not that hard.

Ok, fine. But let’s ask the question: would Google have grown into the “Internet OS” if it punted competitor’s sites from its search index? (note that Google is the 6th result for “search engine” on Google, behind Ask.com and Dogpile) Google has grown and earned the trust of the Internet in part by creating a largely agnostic, de-politicized search engine in which you can trust that the results you see haven’t been skewed (aside from labelled sponsored ads…). MySpace’s omnipresence is vulnerable to the loss of credibility that comes from manipulating what is perceived to be a trusted, free platform. MySpace is the huge user-created content platform, and should start acting the part instead of imposing bizarre, parochial, protectionist measures like this one.

fox, myspace photobucket

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