Investors and marketers have been agog over the potential for Twitter–unlike other social media properties, such as Facebook and MySpace–to crack the code, finally, on wringing revenue from millions of users. But the optimists better brace for disappointment.
One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. …” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.
A week or so ago, I sat down at my desk to find a look of panic on the face of one of my coworkers. “They’re blocking Facebook,” she said. They, of course, are the mysterious men and women who make up our tech support department. Oh no, I thought. This can’t be. I opened my browser and tried to get into Facebook. Nothing.
It read like the teenage party from hell: a riot of sex and wanton damage fueled by underage drinking that only ended when the police arrived. According to media reports, the mother of the teenage hostess was so angry with her daughter that she punched her.
But Jodie Hudson’s lurid description of the party on the social networking website Bebo, subsequently carried in a number of national newspapers, turned out to be fantasy. The media stories, and the accompanying pictures taken from Bebo, are now the subject of a landmark legal case that could redraw the boundaries of the use of information published on social networking sites including Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.
The problem Google (GOOG) is having monetizing its inventory of News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace pages may have more to do with faulty algorithms for ad serving than it does inherent issues with social networking sites.
That’s the conclusion Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield reached in a research piece today on News Corp. “While everyone is blaming social networking as the culprit for Google’s MySpace monetization problems, the real problem is Google itself and its search algorithms for social networking,” he asserts.
It should come as no surprise: Incumbents are beginning to act like incumbents. But while the cable companies are the first ones to jump on the tiered-broadband bandwagon, they won’t be the last. Their argument for limiting bandwidth and data transfers based on price sounds like a good idea, especially as a way to get bargain hunters to buy. In the long run, however, tiered broadband is a terrible idea that will bring the innovation inspired by flat-rate broadband to a screeching halt.
Flat-rate broadband–however cheap or expensive (depending on your point of view) it might be–inspired the formation of Skype, YouTube, Facebook, Apple’s iTunes and MySpace, amongst others. It allowed us to freely experiment, to embrace both the applications and the ideas they represented, such as VoIP, online video, digital downloads and social networking.
What’s wrong with the “friends connection” programs announced by Facebook, MySpace, and Google? Many people have been trying to explain the principle of data portability as if it were a new concept, but it’s actually not. It’s been on our PCs for years.
Think about the applications you use on your computer–the ones that run LOCALLY on your computer. They all produce files. You’ve got your word processor files, your spreadsheet files, your presentation files, your accounting software files. You create some data with the application, then save it to your drive. You can take those files and put them on any other computer and open them with any application that supports the file type.
Over the last five years I have been asked countless times: “Steve, what’s the next hot online community?” It seems as though everybody is on the lookout for the successor to MySpace, Twitter or Facebook. Nobody, even in a difficult economic climate, wants to be viewed as a latecomer.
Perhaps as a defense mechanism to avoid being wrong myself, I now give a boilerplate answer that I believe can last. In short, the next big community is not a single destination. Rather, it is going to be everywhere. To paraphrase Forrester analyst Charlene Li, social networking is becoming “like air.”
With all the commotion over the rise of social networking sites, parental groups and government bodies have been asking for someone to think of the children. In response to rising concerns that Facebook and MySpace have become beacons for sexual predators and bullies, these two leading sites have agreed to add over 40 new safeguards aimed at protecting young users.
Announced today by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, the agreement “marks another watershed step toward social networking safety, protecting kids from online predators and inappropriate content.” Officials from Washington, D.C. and 49 states have signed on to the agreement, which took months of negotiations.
News Corp. execs did more than just admit that they weren’t going to hit their revenue goals for MySpace and Fox Interactive Media today. They also fessed up to another open secret: Selling ads on social networks is really difficult. How difficult? Consider that even while MySpace and all of the other FIM sites continued to grow, FIM revenues dropped from $233 million in Q2 to $210 million in Q3; about a third of that total came from a three-year guaranteed deal from Google.
OK, the title may be a slight exaggeration, but the data from a new study by the social-contact search site Rapleaf is nonetheless interesting.
In what they claim is the largest social-network study ever done, Rapleaf looked at the social connections of both men and women. All told, they collected data from over 30 million people on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Hi5 and others.
Interestingly, when you focus on users with fewer connections (well, relatively speaking–we’re talking about one group of people with between 1 and 100 connections, and another with between 100 and 1,000), women tend to have more friends than men. However, when you get to a really large number of connections (1,000 to 10,000, and also 10,000-plus), men have more friends.
Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are often just one click of a bookmark away on users’ Web browsers. Google looks to be one-upping them by turning its personalized home page, iGoogle, into a social network of sorts. With the new developer sandbox for iGoogle, Google is offering hints of what could be a very grand scheme. The video Google has released is front-loaded with what seem to be routine updates for what developers can do with iGoogle. However, toward the end we’re hit with code for accessing friends’ data and yes, creating an all important (in this day and age of social networks), friends’ activity stream.
A new Internet music company is looking to displace YouTube, MySpace and MTV.com as the hub for music videos on the Internet. PluggedIn, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based start-up launching today, is backed by Overbrook Entertainment, the production and management company co-founded a decade ago by Will Smith.
Compared with other forms of human interaction, online social networking is really not all that social. Meebo, founded by Elaine Wherry, Sandy Jen and Seth Sternberg, offers chat rooms to be embedded in Web pages. People visit each other’s MySpace pages and Facebook profiles at various hours of the day, posting messages and sending e-mail back and forth across the digital void. It’s like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator. Now a new wave of Silicon Valley companies is bringing live socializing back into a medium that has, in the parlance of the technologists, grown overly asynchronous.
There is a new casual gaming network in town that’s got some serious cross-platform chops. Don’t be fooled by the cutesy graphics. Today, Mytopia is simultaneously launching across Facebook, Bebo, MySpace (currently pending approval) and its own Web site with eight games (chess, backgammon, sudoku, dominoes, bingo, spades, hearts and video poker). On Monday, it will release the same games across the major Web and desktop widgets: iGoogle Gadgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and Windows Vista Toolbar Widgets.
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