Facebook membership has exploded to more than 29 million active users, up one million users in just the past week and 5 million from six weeks ago. Facebook says it’s adding more than 150,000 members a day, up from its pace of 100,000 six weeks ago.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg of the Palo Alto based company has seen this huge spike since recently opening the site up from “only student access” combined with the “Web 2.0 style of opening up the site”, allowing software developers to build plug-in programs by the thousands for the site.
CTO Adam D’Angelo says their “far bigger rival MySpace has difficulty striking a balance between sharing personal data and not divulging “too much information.” Due to the more private nature of Facebook many Facebook users post their mobile phone numbers, political affiliations or changes in dating status, while retaining a feeling of better security than MySpace users.
Facebook is inherently not open the way the Web is open. Users share all kinds of information on the site they would never share on the Web, we get users to divulge more information because we protect users’ privacy.” However if you have checked out MySpace recently there is no shyness of many users there either…
A US academic, Danah Boyd, a PhD student at the School of Information Sciences at the University of California. Berkeley, who has been looking into the epistemology of social networking web sites, says there are very distinct class-based differences between users of MySpace and those that favour Facebook.
In a paper recently published Danah Boyd writes that Facebook users, “Tend to come from families who emphasise education and going to college. They are in honours classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities. They are primarily, but not exclusively, white.”
Meanwhile, she says, “MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracised at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers. MySpace is home for Latino and Hispanic teens, immigrant teens and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm”
It is interesting that the US government has banned their troops from using MySpace while still allowing them to use Facebook.
Greg Claymen – Vice President of Wireless Strategy and Operations for MTV “loves FaceBook” and infact is one of the few people who got me hooked on the site. He writes an exciting article here about why he prefers FaceBook to MySpace, and how not only the privacy of FaceBook is different from MySpace but the fact that FaceBook is not really just one community but rather millions of groups forming millions of communities ranging in size from extremely big to the very personal of one on one.
Sherry Turkle thinks the new generation being constantly connected to either their parents or friends via cell phones and social networking sites like MySpace and FaceBook is drastically transforming human psychology.
The “new Generation” or “social networking Generation” are being given the tools to only express themselves, constantly express their state with banal icons or limited to a one word drop down menu. They are not taking time to think during alone time, as they are never in fact alone.
Some also argue that the new SN Generation are constantly lonely as they miss alot of “real” human to human interaction. Of course the flip side of the coin is that the SN Generation are using Social Networks to create groups and organize new type of social reunions and that in fact they have plenty of social interaction, well as much as past generations anyway.
Sherry says “Our society tends toward a breathless techno-enthusiasm: We are more connected; we are global; we are more informed.” However “We communicate with quick instant messages, “check-in” cell calls and emoticon graphics. All of this are meant to quickly communicate a state. They are not meant to open a dialogue about complexity of feeling. The challenge for this generation is to think of sociality as more than the cyber-intimacy of sharing gossip and photographs and profiles. This is a paradoxical time. We have more information but take less time to think it through in its complexity. We’re connecting globally but talking parochially.”
There are many new social networking sites out there: Jawad Karim one of the original founders of YouTube lists the following sites on his YouTube video as Key Killer Apps leading into the new Social Networking ‘revolution’:
- live journal
- Founder: Brad Fitzpatrick
- hot or not
- Founder: James Hong
- wikipedia
- Founder: Jimmy
- friendster
- Founder: Johnathan Abram
- del.icio.us
- Founder: Joshua Schachter
- Flickr
- Founder: Caterina Fake & Stewart Butterfield.
Other newer mainstream social networking sites are:
- www.bebo.com
- Founder: Michael Birch
- www.weblogs.com
- Founder: Jason McCabe Calacanis
- www.siphs.com
- Founder:
- www.lightstalkers.org
- Founder:
- www.care2.com
- Founder: Randy Paynter
- www.librarything.com
- Founder: Tim Spalding
- www.mog.com
- Founder: David Hyman
- www.linkedin.com
- Founder: Konstantin Guericke & Reid Hoffm
- www.jaiku.com
- Founder: Engeström &
- www.numpa.nl
- Founder: Yellow Mind
- www.twitter.com
- Founder: Ev Williams & Biz Stone
- www.pownce.com
- Founder: Diggs Co Founder Kevin Rose
and there are probably many more…
