Danah Boyd wrote last week that Facebook and Myspace show the markings of class division in the U.S. While that makes for an interesting read, I think the whole social networking space is a lot more like your local bar scene than it is like any kind of societal structure. And that creates a problem for social networking sites like Facebook that are hoping to lock up the space once and for all.
Social networking sites are basically like bars - you go there to socialize. But you can socialize at any bar, really, and there are lots to choose from. So why do you go to any one particular bar? Because a) it’s the cool bar at the moment and b) all of your friends are going.
The bars all have a very different feel to them, and they use those distinctive feels to project a particular image to people, to try and get them in the door. Some are wild, anything goes (myspace), some are fun but tidy (facebook) and some are formal and lifeless (linkedin).
The problem is that when your primary purpose for going is to socialize, and you can socialize at any, then these differences become relative, none absolutely better than the others. They become subject to tastes and whims.
Remember last year when Myspace was on top of the world? Everyone was proclaiming their “design your own page” policy to be one of the most brilliant move in history of the web. Now it’s one year later, and everyone is using Facebook. Facebook has a much more structured approach to web design, and people are actually saying that Myspace’s design-your-own-web-page approach is central to its downfall. But in fact it’s all totally relative. It’s just that the crowd has crossed the street, from the Myspace bar over to Facebook, the new hip bar in town, and the view from there makes Myspace look a bit shabby.
Facebook feels pretty hot right now. But I suspect it will get old and boring to people in time, and some newer, hotter bar will open up on the fringes of town somewhere. It’ll have outrageous design, and you’ll be able to do wild things there that you can’t do at Facebook, and the shift will begin.
So why does Danah Boyd see that some (well-educated) people have migrated to Facebook while other (less-educated) people have stayed behind at Myspace? Well, the people at Myspace just haven’t picked up on the fact that the party has moved yet. Or more to the point, the people who they specifically want to party with haven’t moved yet - they’re still partying at Myspace. This who-stays-and-who-goes distinction doesn’t fall along class lines though, any more or less than the movement of nightlife around NYC does. It’s more about who the opinion makers are, and who knows them, and who knows the people who know them and on and on.
Facebook is trying to do an end-run around this fate with its apps. They’re basically asking outside developers to keep their site fresh and re-designed for them all the time. Facebook essentially then becomes a social networking theme park, inside of which smaller social networking trends take off, have regular life spans, and then die, while they themselves live forever. If they can pull this off, kudos to them. But I think social dynamics are bigger than that, and I think Facebook will find itself on the back side of trendiness just like every other social networking site, one of these days.
Which means the window is always open for another social networking hit to come along. Though the odds of actually hitting it are incredibly long. But if you’ve the type who can open a bar in a college town with 1,000 other bars in it, and make yours the hot new thing, maybe you should consider taking a shot at it.
July 20th, 2007 at 8:57 am
I find a city metaphor much more representative and complete than a bar metaphor here. These sites are rich with diverse, de facto neighborhoods for different crowds. It’s too reductive to think of these broad-based social networks as a single, unified space.
MySpace is still undeniably *thee* social network if you’re in a band. And Facebook shows no signs of winning away that demographic anytime soon. It’s just not that kind of cool. It’s college and professional cool (which some might argue is not cool at all). So while Facebook may be the hot place for those crowds, MySpace still has the best music scene.
In this way, I think there’s just as much room for various social networks on the web as there are cities in the world. Each will have its declines and booms over time, just as cities in the real world do. Perhaps MySpace is simply going through its bust-period, as New York City did in the 70s. A change in leadership, a crack-down on spam, favorable incentives for businesses (e.g. app developers once the API is opened up), or a site-wide redesign could change the whole place around.
Hey, Friendster’s still running largely thanks to the boom of its “Little Manila” neighborhood…
July 24th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
Sure, there are lots of possible metaphors, and each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. I think ‘bar’ gets you farther than ‘city’ but to each his own.
An important thing to point out, as far as the class-as-determinant idea goes, is that you choose which web site you wish to participate in at any given moment, whereas you are born and raised into class. One is very fluid, the other is incredibly rigid. So it’s hard to argue that class is a central determinant of web site participation when one is the product of birth and the other is the product of instantaneous choice. Website affiliation is more determined by immediate, fluid social factors (where are my friends right now) than by long-term, rigid ones. Those immediate factors may be influenced by the longer-term ones, but that’s true for everything in society - which bars you hang out at, what restaurants you go to, what clothes you wear. There’s nothing special or different about websites in this regard.