wync

MySpace and Facebook and the Class Divide

Another dynamite post by new-media/social network research extraordinaire, Danah Boyd, on the class divide that is emerging in the social network realm. This article covers a topic that I was speaking about to some folks while visiting the Facebook offices last week - Facebook skews strongly to the middle/upper classes, while the lower classes have stayed with MySpace.

Danah makes the added point that Facebook has begun to encompass "mainstream" (hegemonic) culture while MySpace is home to "alternative" (subaltern) cultures.

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

Viewing American Class Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace

PS - I heard today on NPR a discussion of the birth and death of public swimming pools. In it, it was argued that communal swimming pools were initially very popular, but eventually class and race devisions  lead to the death of the municipal pool. Now the swimming experience primarily exists in private homes. I'm too tired right now to determine whether there is an apt analogy with social networks, but I'll revisit this in a couple of days. Alternatively, if you'd like to do the thinking for me, please write it out in the comments below. :)

Google is Lousy for Reviews

I was looking for reviews of web development software today and found Google's results dissapointing. The top links were all reviews from 2002-2004, thus referencing software that was far out of date. As is typical, I voiced disappointment out loud and my friend Javier overheard. He reasoned that Google gives more weight to pages that are older. Perhaps generally a good idea, but not certainly when you are looking for product reviews

"That's not a company, that's a feature..." Well, now it's a company...

On Thursday, I was fortunate to be at the Facebook F8 Keynote and Hackathon. It was an amazing event, where Zuck gave a keynote with a Jobs-esque flair for pacing and drama.

He announced the launch of Facebook Platform. As it has been covered in detail elsewhere, I won't give a detailed explanation; suffice to say, it allows developers to build new applications (music players, dating services, etc.) within the Facebook environment, giving Facebook users quick and easy access to these new services. An important element of Facebook platform is that developers get to keep all of the ad revenue from the Facebook applications.

I found this interesting, because in Silicon Valley you are constantly exposed to entrepreneurs who have great ideas that aren't sustainable businesses by themselves. The question venture capitalists often ask is, "is that a product or a company?". More recently, with the emergence of web 2.0, the problem has gotten worse. For example, I might have an idea for a much better, simpler way for online invitations to work.  VCs have been asking "is that even a product? or is it a feature?" A great idea isn't such a great idea if nobody knows about it and nobody is signed up. 

Until now. Facebook's platform will allow many of these cool product ideas to actually become businesses in their own right by leveraging Facebook's platform of users. Facebook users won't have to learn a new interface, visit a new web page or change their current behavior.

Pretty cool, I think. Look for my Facebook apps to be launching soon ;)

Yahoo's Big Mistake Losing Face(book)

On Wednesday, Needham analyst Mark May points out what what many have realized for years, Yahoo Messed Up Not Buying Facebook. For the younger demographics Yahoo's brand is irrelevant. Not a single person I have spoken to under 22 uses or cares about any of Yahoo's properties. Facebook, in comparison - well, I'll let the stats speak for themselves. From the report:

Facebook is no doubt one of the most important Internet companies to have been created in the last five years. In just three years since launch the property has attracted 21 million registered users. More phenomenal, however, is that an estimated 93% of those 21 million users are “active”, or log on at least once a month, 85% at least once a week and 60% at least once a day. In addition, average daily usage is reported to be nearly 20 minutes per day per user. According to comScore, Facebook.com ranked as the 36th most-visited site on the Web in February 2007 with 16.7 million unique visitors, and was also the second-most “engaging” site with 23.6 average visits per visitor during the month (see figure below). Facebook has also been ranked as the number one site for photos, ahead of Yahoo!’s Flickr, with over 6 million photos uploaded daily. In a survey conducted last month, eMarketer found that Facebook was the most viewed site by females in the United States (69%) ages 17-25 and also the most viewed website by males (56%). In a survey conducted last year by Student Monitor, Facebook was named the econd most "in" thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and after only the iPod. Those sorts of usage statistics are nearly unheard of, and make Facebook one of the largest and stickiness media properties around.

[via John]

Doug Engelbart: The Original Steve Jobs

I'm in the first class of Social Machines: Online Learning Communities, going over a history of the modern computer and internet. One of the most fascinating characters is a guy named Doug Engelbart, "father of the personal computer."

In a 6-year period in the 60's, Doug and his team developed the mouse, hypertext, the client-server architecture, to a large extent the internet and a slew of other thing. What is amazing is that the bulk of this research was presented in one place, to 1000 people, on Dec 9, 1968. This was the equivalent of Woodstock for computer users. From Wikipedia:

At the Fall Joint Computer Conference, Engelbart, with the help of his geographically distributed team, demonstrated the workings of the NLS (which stood for oNLine System) to the 1,000 computer professionals in attendance... The demo featured the first computer mouse the public had ever seen, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email and hypertext.

Keeping in mind that nobody had seen a personal computer before, this is a pretty amazing demonstration. Thanks to the technologies that Doug and his team envisioned, the video is available below :)

Note: In the cllip, Jeff Rollifson appears, who ends up leading the development of the Mac at Apple.

Chad & Steve on Why YouTube Won

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Chad and Steve, co-founders of YouTube, came to our Entrepreneurship & VC class. I was fortunate to have lunch with them afterwards as well. One of the questions that I asked them was:

Given that there were dozens of video sharing sites before YouTube (indeed, iFilm had seemingly "won" in the space, being acquired years before), what specifically did YouTube do that everybody else missed?*

So, I will generously paraphrase the answer, but basically they said that it came down to two big things. First, although they were a relative late-comer to the online video space, they were the first to add easy embedding of videos in other pages. This allowed them to ride the MySpace phenomenon. Second, YouTube had a highly scalable back-end, so when "viral videos" brought down other services, YouTube stayed up. It turns out that much of the success of these services is based on these viral videos, so this led to YouTube's continues success.

Of course these two major factors were in addition to thousands of "little things" that YouTube did right every day in executing their vision. However, it's instructive to think of the major factors that allowed them to win in a space crowded by so much money and talent.

* Long-term readers may have noted that this is a topic I'm generally interested in. See my post referencing Danah Boyd's thoughts on why MySpace beat Friendster.

State of the Internet

Insightful thoughts on what's been going on online and what's coming next. By super smart PhD, Danah Boyd. Read all about it here.

Technology Tasting at Facebook

This evening I was fortunate to be invited to the Facebook "Technology Tasting". Basically, it was a bunch of Facebook folks and people from around the valley eating and schmoozing. Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz both talked. It was an incredible event and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a place with a higher density of IQ per square foot.

Although Facebook doesn't get a lot of buzz, I believe that it is set to be one of the defining web properties of our generation. It is enormously useful to millions of people and is growing at a dizzying pace. Ask an 18 year old what web sites he or she regularly uses and the answer will almost invariably start with Facebook. (Google comes next. Youtube, MSN/AIM and Wikipedia often round out the list. Yahoo is almost never mentioned.) Tellingly, Facebook is one of the only companies which consistently wins engineering talent when going head-to-head with Google.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the event. Some interesting take-aways:

• The team there seems pretty set on a grand vision for Facebook. They do not see it as a US college social network, instead they see it as a social utility that virtually everybody will use. The data seems to back this up. Facebook is growing strongest in non-US and non-college markets. Two of the biggest areas of market growth are Canada and UK. Furthermore, facebook users who graduate from school don't see any significant drop in usage.
• Users spend an inordinate amount of time on Facebook. Over half of Facebook users use Facebook daily. With approximately 18 million users, Facebook currently accounts for about 1% of all time spent online. (!)
• Though neither Mark nor Dustin spoke much about MySpace, I spoke with some other folks at the event and there seems to be a general consensus that MySpace is waaay overcounting registered users. Many people think that perhaps 70-80% of MySpace's reported 150 million users are spam or inactive.
• Facebook is set to grow to 50 million users by the end of the year and 200 million two years from now.
• Facebook seems to have an incredibly cool and exciting culture. My impression of the company was that it is young, high-energy, hyper-smart and hard-core techie. While friendly and fun, it is definitely not a laid-back place; people are passionate about what they do and work accordingly.

When Mark opened up for questions, I asked him the following: "You articulated a compelling vision for Facebook as an independent company. Can you envision a  in which Facebook would be acquired and, if so, what would that be?" I thought it was an appropriate question: who wants to be recruited by Facebook and end up working for Yahoo?

He had an interesting answer. From his perspective, while he could envision possible acquisitions, "when you have something that's growing this quickly and is providing this much value in the world, that's just not the right thing to consider." He went on to say that, unlike other web companies, Facebook is primarily a technology company. Therefore it doesn't make a lot of sense to be acquired by, say, a media company. He alluded to other options for exit, including an IPO.

OK, so I'm way over my self-imposed (and increasingly ignored) length limit, so I'm off to do my homework.

Update: Dave from Master of 500 Hats sat right in front of me and has some interesting thoughts on the event plus photos.

Vimeo: Taking Video from Commodity to Community

Hung out with my good buddy last weekend. Jon is one of those rare people with whom I have an endless number of things to talk about. Which is fortunate, because he talks a lot. :) Jon has a really cool job running Business Development and Marketing at CollegeHumor. Those who know him know that there is no better person in the world for that job.

One cool thing he showed me was Vimeo. The best way to describe it is a video version of Flickr. Vimeo really gets how take a relative commodity, streaming video, and build a great community around it. The site doesn't focus on stolen clips, but instead on interesting original user-generated content. The feel of the site is much warmer, more creative and cooler than the bigger players. To immediately see how different it is from a site like YouTube, check the comments on posted videos. YouTube comments seem to almost always be negative, poorly written and rude. Vimeo's comments are positive, witty and helpful.* It is just a much better vibe and cooler product. The guys at Connected Ventures have, once again, done a great job.

In the meantime, here are two Vimeo clips of his trip that Jon uploaded:

Matt tours the Stanford d.school on Vimeo

Driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, at night, just after it rained. on Vimeo

* Hey Jon, you should upload your "Stuck in the Elevator" clip to YouTube so we can do a comparison of the types of comments generated by the two sites.

Kids Nowadays...

My cousin Brad just emailed me this great read in the NYT on how kids express themselves online. It talks about how they are increasingly putting their lives on the internet via photos, blogs, videos, etc.

It's a trend I only half get. Ostensibly, I do have a podcast, facebook profile, myspace page, flickr account and blog. Yet it doesn't pervade my life as it pervades the lives of the people in the article. To me it sometimes seems strange. At one hand it seems natural for people to express who they are to the world, on the other hand, with all the photos and videos floating around, it's hard to imagine how anybody will run for political office in the future.

Say Anything (NYT) [Thanks for the link Brad!]