[Air-l] how to pin down web 2.0

[danah boyd]

 From my POV, the most likely MySpace murderer is the Attorneys  
General.  They've already forced a year of anti-predator development,  
forcing the MySpace engineers to not do any meaningful development.   
The >50 piece of legislation against MySpace put them at tremendous  
risk, primarily the Connecticut legislation that would require  
formalized parental permission and unbreakable age verification (with  
a cost of $5K per account per day of noncompliance).  While there are  
librarians and others who are going after DOPA and S49, i know no one  
going after all of the state legislation that would nearly destroy  
social tech development.

One thing to remember in looking at the cycles of startups...  
regardless of what the founders want, when they take VC, they lose a  
lot of control, including much control over sellouts.  There's a lot  
of economic challenges in the business cycles behind startups.   
Another huge issue is that public corporations are forced to grow  
grow grow for Wall Street purposes.  (See my "Incantations for  
Muggles" talk.)  This means that companies like Facebook are forced  
to grow beyond comfortable levels.


On Apr 21, 2007, at 7:33 PM, Hugemusic wrote:

> Also, there's the very real prospect that commercial involvement will
> destroy the very fabric of many Web 2.0 efforts.  I'm still sure  
> (but less
> so than I was) that Murdoch is going to destroy MySapce in spite of  
> his own
> best efforts.  He's nearly done it already and it was only the  
> founders who
> saved him. Time will tell.