That is a very interesting question Martin, but it does implies a level of technological stabilization that we have yet to see. When I started watching teens online, pre-PhD studies, most were in chatrooms/MUDs/MOOs. When IMs developed and improved they added that stream to the technological grab bag. As new channels became more widely available, some moved to blogging but many stayed with the streams they were familiar with, sometimes moving to more advanced tools but often not. Now ten years later where are those kids that were 14 and 15 then, many have little if any presence online and have kept IMs as their main communication tool. Some still blog, a few have mored to Facebook or LinkedIn. How will it work when younger kids can enter an age specific tool, with more advanced age specific tools ahead of them...more research is needed. Personally I wouldn't bet on seeing 1) enough stabilization to draw good conclusions, and 2) for there to be anything close to a straight path for transition, unless someone actually designed such a series of sites. Lois Ann Scheidt Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington IN USA Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA and IUPUC, Columbus IN USA Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com Blog: http://www.professional-lurker.com Quoting Martin Garthwaite <marting@gmail.com>:
Whilst I have done no research on this I would be interested in research (longitudinal?) that looks into the waves of usage / migration. For argument sake do the youngest users start with bebo, then move to myspace, then move to facebook (over simplistic I know given the large number of SNS) over a number of years.
Dealing with orphaned accounts is an interesting problem for the SNS owners.
On 8/22/07, Hugemusic <hmusic@ozemail.com.au> wrote:
Just read an (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070820/media_nm/myspace_dc) article about the different fortunes of MySpace and Facebook. Now, the article is framed as a discussion of how the two sites compare from the point of view of growth and total numbers, but there was another figure the writer ignored that is very revealing indeed.
The article lists the unique visitation of MySpace in July 2007 as 61.3 million, which sounds pretty impressive, especially when you consider that it's up 33.3% on last year. Great! But when I logged on this morning, my "Network" was 197,539,132 - more than three times the number of unique visitors. Even allowing for rounding of that network down to, say 180 million, that still means that 2/3 of account holders don't visit MySpace each month!
Is this because of the migration we discussed earlier? Are some of these 2/3 of account holders delinquent? Do the numbers stack up to the hype? I believe the profit figures on the venture were spectacular the other week ...
Personally, I have three MySpace accounts for various band activities, but if the damn site gets any heavier and/or slower, I'm gonna give up as a bad job ...
What do people think??
Cheers, Hughie
The Genre Benders: "I am leaving! I am leaving!" - out now at www.genrebenders.com www.cdbaby.com/genrebenders
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-- Martin Garthwaite
PhD candidate, London Knowledge Lab www.lkl.ac.uk
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