tony spencer

I skipped out on the office today so I could catch Danah Boyd’s talk on social networking ala MySpace on the campus of UNC. Danah is a candid speaker and a damn good one as well. She put on as the shy type before the talk kicked off but as soon as Fred Stutzman introduced her she hit the ground running in a very entertaining and comfortable talk about the explosion of MySpace and the general teen culture on the internet.

Danah let it slip that she had collected info on nearly all Friendster and MySpace users which I interprete to mean that she wrote code to scrape all profiles. Cool! I can relate! So it was you that was the cause for Friendster to be so slow back in the JSP days. (P.S. to both Danah and Fred: the 100 million figure on MySpace is bogus. I know people generating MANY believeable profiles on MySpace with bots and I think they account for a pretty large chunk. MySpace is pretty inept to dealing with bots. Open up a thousand threads and let her rip!). But most of the talk was non-geeky and focused on how teens and adults interact in the virtual world. Here are some of my notes:

As a result of the 60’s backlash society has sought to constrain teens
and keep in a constant state of activity. Myspace is an outlet in a world in which teens are mostly occupied with school related activities.

These are just rough notes. I’ll clean them up this weekend.

Properties of MySpace
persistance – conversation continues when you aren’t around
searchability -
replicability – publish your conversation you had with your friend
invisible audiences -

Diliemna for teens – be cool but not get in trouble with adult peers

battlecry – social network by jerry fallwell

privacy problem with FB feeds
yes you can get that data by refreshing someones profile daily or through a script but not likely

exposure – don’t tell the world when i join a threesome group. friends with that geeky person
but don’t want all your friends to be notified

invasive – information that people are not ready deal with. cobot collected data in rooms.

cognitive caps to how much info you can deal with. following all that info is not reciprocal.
just b/c i follow someone carefully doesn’t mean they are there for you. what are the social
costs of having this info?