[Air-L] The slow decay of mySpace?

[Nancy Baym]

I think most, if not all, SNSs have a lot of inactive accounts. On 
the one hand it's in their best interest to count them, so they look 
really popular when they give 'user' figures to the press. On the 
other, they are a bit of a drain on resources and also cause problems 
for people looking for others (on Last.fm, the SNS I look at most, 
there is constant complaining about being assigned 'neighbours' -- ie 
algorithmic matches based on music listening habits -- who are 
inactive).

But it's important to realize that for all the talk of 'migration' 
there is also a tremendous amount of ... simultaneous habitation? 
Unlike geographical homesteading, as the 'migration' metaphor 
implies, online people live in a lot of places at once. Perhaps its 
more like buying vacation homes than migrating.

In the data I have from Last.fm users, about half of the people who 
are friends on Last.fm are also friends on at least one other SNS 
(MySpace and FB are the most common, but by no means the only ones) 
and many also connect on webboards, IRC channels, and many other 
sorts of spaces both online and off.

So I would caution against binary thinking that if people are adding 
accounts to one site they are abandoning accounts on other sites. 
That goes on, but there are also huge amounts of cross-site 
connections being built that are often ignored in site-focused 
research. I wrote about this recently in the context of online fans 
of Swedish indie music who use many sites including MySpace, FB, 
Last.fm, YouTube, blogs and websites in highly interconnected ways: 
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/baym/index.html

Nancy

>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.
...