[Air-L] The slow decay of mySpace?

[Lois Ann Scheidt]

That is a very interesting question Martin, but it does implies a level 
of technological stabilization that we have yet to see.  When I started 
watching teens online, pre-PhD studies, most were in 
chatrooms/MUDs/MOOs.  When IMs developed and improved they added that 
stream to the technological grab bag.

As new channels became more widely available, some moved to blogging 
but many stayed with the streams they were familiar with, sometimes 
moving to more advanced tools but often not.

Now ten years later where are those kids that were 14 and 15 then, many 
have little if any presence online and have kept IMs as their main 
communication tool.  Some still blog, a few have mored to Facebook or 
LinkedIn.

How will it work when younger kids can enter an age specific tool, with 
more advanced age specific tools ahead of them...more research is 
needed.  Personally I wouldn't bet on seeing 1) enough stabilization to 
draw good conclusions, and 2) for there to be anything close to a 
straight path for transition, unless someone actually designed such a 
series of sites.

Lois Ann Scheidt

Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana
University, Bloomington IN USA

Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA and
IUPUC, Columbus IN USA

Webpage:  http://www.loisscheidt.com
Blog:  http://www.professional-lurker.com


Quoting Martin Garthwaite <marting at gmail.com>:

> Whilst I have done no research on this I would be interested in research
> (longitudinal?)  that  looks into the waves of usage / migration. For
> argument sake do the youngest users start with bebo, then move to myspace,
> then move to facebook (over simplistic I know given the large number of SNS)
> over a number of years.
>
> Dealing with orphaned accounts is an interesting problem for the SNS owners.
>
> On 8/22/07, Hugemusic <hmusic at ozemail.com.au> wrote:
>>
>> Just read an (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070820/media_nm/myspace_dc)
>> article about the different fortunes of MySpace and Facebook. Now, the
>> article is framed as a discussion of how the two sites compare from the
>> point of view of growth and total numbers, but there was another figure
>> the
>> writer ignored that is very revealing indeed.
>>
>> The article lists the unique visitation of MySpace in July 2007 as 61.3
>> million, which sounds pretty impressive, especially when you consider that
>> it's up 33.3% on last year. Great! But when I logged on this morning, my
>> "Network" was 197,539,132 - more than three times the number of unique
>> visitors.  Even allowing for rounding of that network down to, say 180
>> million, that still means that 2/3 of account holders don't visit MySpace
>> each month!
>>
>> Is this because of the migration we discussed earlier? Are some of these
>> 2/3
>> of account holders delinquent?  Do the numbers stack up to the hype?  I
>> believe the profit figures on the venture were spectacular the other week
>> ...
>>
>> Personally, I have three MySpace accounts for various band activities, but
>> if the damn site gets any heavier and/or slower, I'm gonna give up as a
>> bad
>> job ...
>>
>> What do people think??
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Hughie
>>
>> The Genre Benders:  "I am leaving! I am leaving!"
>>     - out now at www.genrebenders.com
>>                         www.cdbaby.com/genrebenders
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Martin Garthwaite
>
> PhD candidate, London Knowledge Lab www.lkl.ac.uk
>
> +447957 764819
> Skype id mgarthwaite1330
> MS IM marting at gmail.com
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