Stubbleblog

In the comments of my post Social Network Fatigue is a Red Herring, Jon Udell challenged me to get actual numbers on how many people join more than one social network and how many networks they tend to join. Today I ran across this quote on the Hitwise blog:

the other [non-Myspace] 19 social networks on the chart above received 25.8% of their upstream visits from MySpace. In other words, one in four visits to the 19 other leading social networks came directly from MySpace, demonstrating the vast breadth of its influence among users of most of these other sites.

I first read that as conclusive evidence that there’s a very large group of people who aren’t effected by social network fatigue. But you could also claim that the traffic is coming from users with MySpace fatigue (a fatigue particular to MySpace and in no way damning of the sector) who are searching for a new home. In any case, the rest of the social network sector should be thankful, they’re getting the kind of traffic from MySpace that most web companies hope to get from Google.

Also of note, social network traffic accounts for 6.5% of all internet traffic, is up 11.5% over the last month and 87% over the last year.

The SF Chronicle had a story on online taunting the other day:

Nationwide, more than four in 10 teens have been victims of taunts and threats via social network Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook, instant messages and text messages from cell phones, a new survey says. One in eight reported feeling scared enough to stay home from school, according to the survey by the National Crime Prevention Council.

What I want to know is how many of those teens only receive threats and taunts online. A lot of that bullying is probably going on in person. The difference is that the onliine bullying leaves a trail. It reminds me of the parents who sued MySpace, and lost, because their children had been the victims of sexual predators. Is MySpace creating increased crime? Or is it a honeypot that catches crime that would have otherwise been undetected? I say honeypot, but that’s a hard thing to say to the MySpace mothers whose children had been safe up until that point.

From Moshe Yudkowsky:

People usually borrow the term “walled garden,” which implies that wonderful things grow inside while keeping baneful influences on the outside.

I propose we borrow a different term: “prison farm.” Yes, you can grow things on the inside; and yes, they will work and keep you alive. But guards with legal sanctions keep you locked up inside, and all the good things in life are happening someplace else.

If you blog on MySpace I won’t read it because the RSS feed doesn’t include the full entry.

If you email me on MySpace I’ll wait weeks until I read it. The experience is so painful that I want to experience it as rarely as possible and only in batch form.

However, if you friend me on MySpace I’ll accept within seconds. I don’t want people to think I’m unpopular.