Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
The obvious answer to this is that Facebook was closed to the general public until September 2006. In 2004 to early 2005, you had to be a college student at a top-30 or so school to be able to use Facebook. Throughout 2005, that loosened to all colleges. In Sept. 2005, they opened to "invited" highschoolers.
So let's flash-forward to September 25, 2006. MySpace's population is drawn from the general public, and Facebook's population is "college students, recent college grads from top schools, and high schoolers who are friends with college students". The next day, Facebook opens to everyone. If you don't have many friends who are "college students, recent college grads from top schools, and high schoolers who are friends with college students", you have little incentive to join Facebook.
And then people left?
However, social networks do a pretty good job at segregating - as long as your friends are bourgeois and share your bourgeois design sensibilities, you can use MySpace without bumping into too much 'profile bling'.
Instead, it seems that some white and Asian kids of high socioeconomic status joined Facebook because it was associated with elite universities and therefore reflected their aspirations - and once this process started, people went where their friends were, self-segregating along racial and economic lines just like they do in high school (and throughout the rest of society.) Aesthetic tastes became a socially-acceptable justification for that move, but I don't think they were the primary cause.
That said, a good knowledge of the aesthetic preferences of various social groups could be valuable. Could a startup trigger a similar 'white flight' in an established service by intentionally appealing to the most economically valuable demographic? Can we build good niche businesses by creating things like race-specific Twitter clients?
Would it be ethical to do so?
Yes. And they'd be "niche" in the sense that Fox News is "niche." (Best comment on Fox ever: "They discovered a previously untapped market niche: half the country.")
Half the country, literally, is so far off the radar screen for most software companies it is embarrassing.
There are dating sites for every conceivable slice of the demographic pie. This applies to many other sites too, although I think a lot of folks don't realize it. (You guys know Demand Media because of their SEO strategy, not because they are dominating the Internet of interest to your demographic.)
If they don't put a stop to the spammers, and build some better tools to filter users they're gonna get MySpaced in a big way.
EDIT This stunning bit of prose just came across my feed: "LOL NIGGAS IS SO FUNNY .... FUCK IT !"
I don't want to see this, anymore than they want to see me talk about agile software development.
I have a pretty short twitter name and get @ed with garbage messages by random people.
They could stop allowing that sort of behavior, but they know that a large part of their user-base consists of 'self marketers' and other less subtle spam.
Why can't I sort or filter any of my incoming tweets in any meaningful way? I can have favorites. I can make lists. I CAN'T just type in 'Fck', and stop my feed from showing me the tweets with the word 'Fck' in them.
I can search for tweets about 'Ruby On Rails', but I can't just add those people to a list called 'Ruby On Rails' without clicking each one of them... Several times.
To top it off their API is so limited that just retrieving a list of the people I'm following means I get blocked for an hour before I can do anything with it, and bypassing their silly API is against the TOS. So writing my own tool to filter properly is straight out.
I wanted to write a simple naive Bayesian filter app to separate the wheat from the chaff for me, but they make it damned near impossible to do so without being sued.
In no way is that not your fault. None whatsoever.
I do agree that a filtering mechanism would be MUCH appreciated, however.
Let me restate it more precisely: The fact that my needs are not being met is their fault. The fact that I have those needs is mine.
My use case, and those of many others, requires the ability to 'follow' others and still filter their 'useful' postings from their 'non-useful' postings. This is 'my fault', in that I require more from the service than they are either willing or able to provide at this time.
Twitter has reduced my ability to use the service, in the way that I would most like to, by limiting their API and preventing screen scrapers from functioning in a legal and non-harmful way. None of this is any way my fault.
I still think my original phrasing was more concise, if not as explicit.
I do think, though, that not reciprocating is probably sufficient. I should've mentioned that I'm also a minimalist and like to keep my lists clean.
1) Craptastic, browser-clogging pages 2) Audio player that kept changing and getting worse 3) Mail full of VOTE FOR ME!!!!!1111 spam 4) Everyone basically begging you to frikkin BUY something of theirs 5) The Walled Garden: Hellish trying to link back to it
There was no direction, no sense that anyone was in charge. This is the second online catastrophe for Murdoch. He has the Kiss of Death for digital.
EDIT: And during my time there, there was never a racial component to anything. It's really a tragedy too. There was music there I never found as easily anywhere else.
Myspace looks "ghetto" simply because there are more minority bands, and so more minorities still maintain active facebook profiles.
At least in the beginning (this has changed as Facebook has become more mainstream), you didn't hear people in "up and coming" bands flogging their Facebook URL, it was all MySpace. The flipside of that was, if you were just a regular person looking to interact with your friends, and not someone trying to 'build a brand' or tell people what club you were playing at this weekend, Facebook seemed like the place to go.
The article talks about spammers, and spam was/is certainly a problem, but MySpace turned itself into a vehicle for self-promotion much earlier and more crassly than Facebook did. I think that shaped the direction of the site and drove users who weren't looking for that away.