It's SO over: cool cyberkids abandon social networking sites
guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
Every time a user changes his status message it gets logged as if it were a tweet. It's more like facebook than twitter, though, in the sense that only mutual "friendships" would be possible (could be made configurable: "allow anyone to see my status updates, but not my online status, and only allow mutual friends to chat/talk to me").
It would be a pretty good signal to noise ratio for most people.
Another idea that I have for the future of social networking is that it will open up again, or become less private. The problem with facebook is that it has become a glorified rolodex where you can list and keep track of everyone you know, but you don't find or meet anyone new, anymore, because everyone has private profiles. Thus, the only people you friend are old classmates, relatives, or people you meet in the "real-world". It used to be the opposite, I used to friend new people all the time by searching networks with like interests or by stumbling onto people through friends of friends. People will either need to loosen up, or use virtual aliases so that people can actually network and find other like-minded friends on "social" networks, again.
We don't need to know this. We (this social media culture/generation) spend more time finding out what other people are doing than actually doing anything. It doesn't matter what your friends or your brother or your aunt did today or last night or last month even.
As a casual user who visits Facebook a couple times a week, I find it to be tremendously valuable. Contrast with email for a moment. I somehow made it into my inlaws' family list. This is a group of perhaps 100 families who all manage their own copy of the list via Reply All. Many of them post multi-page updates of their domestic tasks several times a week. I can never be removed from or block this list because I may receive legitimate email from any of these people. I may occasionally actually be interested in what they are doing, but as it is the problem is worse than spam by a long shot. Now that some of them are getting on Facebook it is a huge improvement. I can block the truly annoying people and still keep ambient awareness of what's going on on my own schedule.
I think Facebook is a tremendously useful tool, which is often obscured inside the echo-chamber by the feeding frenzies around virality and engagement. In other words, I believe Facebook is sustainable.
"Clearly take-up among under 16-year-olds is very high … so we cannot say for certain whether this is people in a certain age group who are not setting up social networking profiles or whether it's a population shift which is reflecting people getting older and having a social networking profile that they set up two years ago," he said. "The main point is the profile of social networking users is getting older."
among 15-to 24-year-olds (...) data suggests they are spending less time on social networking sites.
the cool kids are the trendsetters. Something that is already adopted by more than 10% of all age groups can not be trendy or cool in any way, it's just the status quo.
cyber is a word that could only be associated with cool 15-20 years ago. 10 years ago it was already tiredly rolling off the tongues of wrinkled white politicians to whom John McCain was a scrappy young upstart.
kids, well, now we're getting somewhere. If the 16-24 demographic is using Facebook less that's at least an interesting statistic, but it doesn't warrant this kind of inaccurate clumsy hipster wannabe title.
Also, the figures look pretty bogus, apparently 22% of people age 15-24 have their own website? (this is not counting blogs or SNS, eg MySpace). I don't know a huge number of people in this age bracket but none have their own websites.
EDIT: Where "less than willing" means "OMG I HAZ NO CREDIT CARD!!1!"
What sort of conclusion can you draw from a single 5% change in data? What's the noise level in that sample?
fits in, doesn't it