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Youths No Longer Predominant on MySpace
mikesd81 writes "The Associated Press is reporting on the rapid aging of MySpace. More than half of MySpace's users are now 35 or older. From the article: 'Just a year ago, teens under 18 made up about 25 percent of MySpace, the popular online hangout run by News Corp. That's now down to 12 percent in the comScore analysis released Thursday. By contrast, the 35-54 group at MySpace grew to 41 percent in August, from 32 percent a year earlier ... The study was based on comScore's regular panels for measuring Internet audiences, rather than MySpace's registration information, where users often lie about their age.'"
More predators, less victims.
Supposedly, this company has some method of telling the age of a person based on their MySpace profile. I'm guessing it involves voodoo.
Or maybe they just assume that everyone who likes Norwegian black metal is 14 years old, everyone who likes Neil Diamond is 57, and everyone else is 39.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
That was my first thought when I saw the headline. I don't really talk to teenagers these days, so I don't know about MySpace, but some time ago I read about somebody's "theory of cool" (I can't remember where) that seemed pretty accurate. The idea is that there are stages that pretty much everything "cool" goes through, and it went something like this:
I knew MySpace was heading in this direction, but there's one thing that might save it. Apparently it started out as a place for musicians and became a general social networking site, and as it has become less cool, it seems to be reverting to a place for musicians... And there it might continue to eek out enough profits to get by. But we all knew it wouldn't stay the cool place forever.
I've wondered, in fact, if this might become a new business model in the new internet economy. A "hit of the moment with planned obsolescence". It seems to me that everything cool dies off, and internet fads spike quickly and then degrade. The key might be that, instead of planning to continue growing at ridiculous speeds, these sites might figure out how to squeeze everything they can out of the spike, and then degrade gracefully, either without any great loss or, if they're lucky, to become a minor fixture on the net.
On the other hand, I guess there's no incentive to do that. From the point of view of the owners, it's better to sell during the spike for a ridiculously high price, and let someone else deal with trying to keep the growth rate up on the now "uncool" venture. First Napster, now MySpace, next up, YouTube.
This can only mean one thing: MySpace users are aging at a faster rate than the rest of us.
We should look into this. Is there something about ugly HTML that increases the human rate of aging? This really demands further study.
Read my blog.
I'll give you a damn good reason to be on a virtual community (e.g., you're on Slashdot right now) instead of striking a conversation with your good neighbour Jack Random: common interests. E.g., I'd rather talk or read a post about computers, history, or cats, than listen to the local drone go on and on about football (soccer) and cars.
Frankly, most conversations born out of sheer geographical proximity are fucking boring. There's a whole class of topics that really interest noone that much, like sports or the weather, that exist only as the lowest common denominator for talks between perfect strangers. ("Say, it's cloudy today." Yes, I noticed it, I'm not fucking blind.)
And people who devote a disproportionate amount of their time just to stay on top of such common denominator topics. E.g., sports. There are plenty of people whose only real interest in sports and in following the prowess of a give team, whether they consciously realize it or not, is only really to seem to belong to the local group of Tom, Dick and Harry who seem interested in that team. Bonus points if it's just groupthink, and deep down inside, Tom, Dick and Harry aren't in it for any other reason either.
Me, I'd rather find someone and some topic more interesting than that. On the Internet if that's what it takes.
I'll give you a second one: to stay in touch with old pals. People occasionally do have to move.
Plus, it's not even something new, and you only need to look at history to see how bogus that argument is. The same could be said for snail mail letters, for example. Here, lemme rephrase it for you: "Also, there are few reason for these letters. The whole point of them is to meet people you will never actually meet. Want some social interaction. Try striking up a conversation with somebody, that alwasy seesm to work well for me."
And yet, ever since someone inventing writing on a stone or clay tablet, people have used them to communicate with other people, some they'll likely never meet in person. All sorts of people, including philosophers, novelists, playwrights, statesmen, etc, yes, have often enough preferred to spend an evening writing a letter to an old friend or to someone with similar interests, instead of just going out and striking a random conversation about the weather. For the most famous ones you can even go to the local book store or library and buy a a book or three with transcripts of their correspondence. Those alone would make a nice mountain of evidence that people occasionally do want to socialize with someone more interesting than the locally available Joe and Jane Random. Go figure.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I guess I'm one of them. I put up a MySpace page a few months ago, trying to locate people for planning a 20th high school reunion. I've actually found more of my classmates at MySpace than at any other site on the 'net.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo