Get out of MySpace

"My 12-going-on-15-year-old daughter is too young for MySpace, but when I watch her on the computer she's doing things that are very foreign to me," writes Jonathan Weber in a comment article about online social networking. "Am I too old, or too set in my ways, or too anti-social to grasp the core appeal of services like MySpace, Facebook and del.icio.us? Or, is there simply much less to it all than meets the eye?"

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Social networking on the internet, I have to confess, remains something of a mystery to me, and I can't decide if that's something I should be worried about. Am I too old, or too set in my ways, or too anti-social to grasp the core appeal of services like MySpace, Facebook and del.icio.us? Or, is there simply much less to it all than meets the eye?

From a business standpoint, of course, this is no small question. Facebook, the site for college students, was so confident that it rejected an $800 million offer from Yahoo a few months ago, according to a recent story in Business Week. But traffic to the site is suddenly declining, according to measurement firm comScore, and its value could be too. While News Corp is widely considered to have gotten a deal with its $580 million purchase of MySpace, the long-term prospects of the social networking site are unclear.

My 12-going-on-15-year-old daughter is too young for MySpace, but when I watch her on the computer she's doing things that are very foreign to me. Eight or ten instant messaging windows are open at once, she's chatting with all her friends, sometimes visiting an online game where the main activity is... chatting with friends. She is "social networking" in a big way, and I guess when I was her age girls did this same thing but via telephone. Teen girls like to socialize - no news there - and there's obviously a business in enabling that over the Net.

Indeed, to the extent that sites like MySpace and Facebook are glorified dating services for teens and 20-somethings, well, that much I do get. The universal desire to flirt and get laid always has and always will drive a lot of commerce. But there's supposed to be a lot more to it than that: we have a MySpace page for New West (run by one of our college student interns, of course) but I don't really know what we're supposed to do with it. What does it mean for New West to have "friends" on MySpace?

Similarly, del.icio.us (now owned by Yahoo) and a variety of new services of similar ilk are designed to enable people to share their online habits and preferences with others. Yet if I want to know what a friend thinks is cool or interesting I will ask them, and if they're not a friend, well, why would I be interested? True, I could learn some things from what people I admire are doing online, and I could probably learn more about New West readers. But life is short, and I'm not sure if spending time scouting del.icio.us bookmarks is the best thing I could be doing for the business.

I've been a member of Linked-In, the business networking site, for quite a while, but I don't really use it. I'm not sure why. I'm certainly not a bad networker when it comes to business, but email (and in-person conferences) are still my best tools. And on the "social" side, well, my problem is finding time for the social relationships I already have, not finding ways to develop new ones.

"Community" means a lot of different things in the media world and it's clear that there are some very important and enduring online communities. eBay is one, and it has a clear purpose: building trusted relationships among buyers and sellers. Slashdot, and now to some extent Digg.com, are where techies meet to decide what's important. Countless affinity groups, which might once have congregated around print magazines, now network via websites, email lists and blogs. At New West, we're building a community of people who love the Rocky Mountain West and care about its future, and we want to create more and better tools for those people to connect with one another.

But strong communities have something at their core driving them, something deeper than a desire to "network" and "make friends." In the case of Facebook, the core community is pre-existing - students at the same college - and although it's hazardous to make predictions about these things, it seems like the site's efforts to expand beyond that are working against it. MySpace? Well, size can create its own momentum. But the big drivers seem to be dating and music-sharing, and that looks a little fragile to me.

There's an emerging theory about participation in online communities that says one percent of the people drive most of the activity, another 20 percent participate from time to time, and the rest are passive viewers and recipients. And of course those are percentages of people who are involved at all. If this is true, it means that much fewer people are spending a lot of time in online communities than the breathless talk and big numbers would suggest.

So maybe I'm not as much of an anti-social fogy as I thought.

And maybe the media companies in a tither about all of this should remember how fickle that one percent can be. Friendster, remember, was the MySpace of just a few years ago. By the time my daughter is old enough for an account, she and her friends might have found different ways to network.

Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a new type of regional news and information service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard