International Law

Reality check

ReadWriteWeb puts the Facebook hype in perspective:

While the media and Silicon Valley have lost our collective minds over the rise of Facebook over the past year, traffic analysts Hitwise released numbers today indicating that things are not as they might seem. Apparently, all the Facebook hype has not translated into a huge growth in social network market share among US users. Hitwise says that Myspace received 72.32% of US visits to the top ten social networks in December 2007, while Facebook received just over 16%.

How about year over year growth? Facebook had 10.59% marketshare in December 2006, Hitwise says. Myspace dropped from nearly 79%. It appears that social networking has grown in general; though Facebook posts impressive numbers of new users, in terms of sheer visits Myspace is nearly keeping up with its growth.

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Facebook is interesting but Myspace is where the users are, still.

Is Classism Part of this Story?

It's entirely possible that people actually know about this already, but that the technocratic classes are excited as they (we) are about Facebook for another reason. Money. It's been documented and is generally understood that Facebook users tend to come from wealthier demographics that are more invested in the high-end economy than are Myspace users.

There has certainly been a lot of innovation at Facebook, and that innovation is more accessible to developers than the still-forthcoming Myspace Platform, but how much of this excitement about Facebook is really grounded in the perception that it's the Junior LinkedIn - the path to yuppie pockets. If people mock niche social networks aimed explicitly at wealthy or upwardly mobile people - why is it more polite to focus on a social network widely understood as yuppie-focused (Facebook) as the future of everything important on the internet? How often does the press pay attention to BlackPlanet.com? Not very often, as far as I can tell.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on January 17, 2008 (boomark / email).