Tag Archive for ‘myspace’ at diversity.net.nz

Tag Archive for 'myspace'

What hope if free only achieves 20%

Published by Ben Kepes on August 13, 2008 in Business, SaaS, SocialMedia, Society and Strategy. 4 Comments

Really interesting article over here looking at the uptake of social media. The gist of the post is that Facebook and MySpace have only roughly a one in five uptake in the US market. That is only 20% of consumers with Internet access are utilising their services.

The question is whether one in five signifies a plateau or an early stage uptake. If it indicates the latter, and user numbers will head north of 50%, then the immense valuations being put on some of these properties might be valid (notwithstanding their lack of clear monetisation paths - if you own a massive chunk of Internet users, there must be something you can do to convert them).

If however this one in five figure is indicative of a plateau, there is a real problem. Bear in mind that it’s discovering new users that accounts for much of the stickiness of these offerings, if their growth slows then so to does their stickiness for users. Lowering stickiness results in lowered visits. Lowered visits limits monetisation options and potential size.

Me - I’m picking a slowing in the growth of these properties. They won’t suffer a real plateau for another couple of years but growth will definitely begin to slow over the next six months.

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Let’s give up pretending that "friends" means friends…

Published by Ben Kepes on June 19, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, Society and Web x.0. 4 Comments

Over on Newsweek there is much concern and hand-wringing over the number of “friends” one can have on social networking sites. The author points out Facebook’s 5000 friend limitation and MySpace’s no-holds barred, bring as many as you like mentality.

They even drag out the obligatory expert, in this case some guy that has written a book (believe it or not) all about social networking. It’s like people are trying to continue this charade that in fact people we friend on social networking sites are actually friends. Newsweek finally comes out saying;

Maybe by now you’re getting the idea that a friend at Facebook or MySpace is not necessarily the same as a real friend, the kind who brings you chicken soup when you’re sick and posts multiple favourable reviews about your book on Amazon

You don’t say!

In this respect the business networks have an easier path than the social networking players, no one thinks for a minute that a contact on LinkedIn is a friend - rather it is a business connection with a specific level of connectedness. On Facebook however their is no distinction between my wife (who is a friend of mine) and the guy who left my suburb back when we were seven years old (he’s a friend as well). Newsweek gets back to hand wringing saying;

But such online linking does have deep social implications, and as one’s friend list grows, so do some problems. People judge each other by whom they list as friends. Inevitably, human noise finds its way into a collection of friends, because people tend to cave in and agree to friendship when asked by someone they barely know, or in some cases don’t know at all. In real life, we are spared the explicitness of a bald request to be a friend, but there’s no such luck online—even ignoring someone’s friend request doesn’t gloss over the fact that you’re rejecting him or her. “It’s socially awkward, and very hard to draw the line,” says Danah Boyd, a researcher at the UC Berkeley School of Information.

I can see it now - we’re going to spawn an entire industry of psychoanalysis based on social networking friend envy - oh please. So in an attempt to minimise the neuroses of an entire generation, I’d like to suggest a new descriptor that once and for all removes any suggestion that these people are friends - lets call them connections and then chose how closely we classify them - friends is just too much of a misnomer.

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Mainstream media sometimes doesn’t get it…

Published by Ben Kepes on May 16, 2008 in New Zealand and Web x.0. 2 Comments

I love New Zealand’s National Radio, but sometimes it needs to stick to it’s knitting. This morning they had a piece of Facebook, its battle for eyeballs in New Zealand with Bebo and concerns over security.

It’s an attempt to get a somewhat aware voice but in reality it shows the gap between the early/middle adopters and the late, late, late ones. The reporter even manages to give some examples of other social networking offerings including “tweeter”