twopointouch

News Corporation’s COO Peter Chernin told investors at the Merrill Lynch Media & Entertainment Conference that MySpace could move to develop its own applications to rival or dominate other Web 2.0 services:

“If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace … There’s no reason why we can’t build a parallel business … Given that most of their traffic comes from us, if we build adequate, if not superior, competitors, I think we ought to be able to match them, if not exceed them”

It may be naive, but I can see two issues with this strategy.

Lanjut →

Some very interesting debate recently about Metcalfe’s Law, network effects and its application to Web 2.0 communities. I picked up the trail at Silicon Beat here which led me to a post by Metcalfe himself here, and some clever comments in an earlier post by Fred Stutzman here.

Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network grows as the square of its number of users. This graph shows what he means.

Lanjut →

Compared to 2000, children are now around 30% less likely to be sexually solicited online, but more likely to encounter pornography and to be harassed. The University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center surveyed 1500 children last year and compared findings with a similar group five years earlier. The full report is available for download here (PDF file). The study suggests that the reduction in solicitations may indicate better awareness among young people of the potential dangers:

Lanjut →

OK. Because I’m researching this stuff, I started a MySpace page. I know it’s not really aimed at misanthropes with beer bellies, but I thought I needed to do it, eat my own dog food, etc.

So it’s been a few weeks now. Me and my friend Tom Anderson have been getting along fine. It’s a fairly unusual friendship - I’d say we have a silent understanding. The system imported my address book to start and sent some people messages. I never got one back, but I assumed they’d also started MySpace pages to test it out, like me.

So I was surprised and excited to get an email saying that “kelli” wanted to be my friend last week. Who’s kelli, I wondered? I don’t know any err… kellis. Better have a look at her profile. Californian 23-year-old, with 80 friends, eh? I didn’t recognise her, but I found several links to her other site, which was [NSFW] here.

Ah. My new friend wants me to pay for explicit pictures and cybersexual instant messaging with her. This must be what Pete Cashmore and the others call the MySpace Economy.

The American House of Representatives passed Resolution 5319, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), by a 410 to 15 vote yesterday. This will require schools and libraries to block access to social networking sites and chat rooms by children. Organisations that do not block access will lose their government subsidies. The subject has excited intense interest among people who don’t use such sites: Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican told CNN that social networks "have become a haven for online sexual predators who have made these corners of the Web their own virtual hunting ground."

Well, actually, the evidence for this moral panic just isn’t there. Danah Boyd provides an excellent commentary on the shortsightedness and ineffectuality of these ‘reforms’:

This legislation will not protect minors, but it will continue to erode their (and our) freedoms. There are so many amazing things that teens do with social technologies. To lose all of this because of the culture of fear is terrifying to me. I found out about my alma mater talking to strangers online in the 90s. I learned about what it means to be queer, how to have confidence in myself and had so many engaging conversations. Sure, i found some sketchy people too, but i learned to ignore them just as i learned to ignore the guys who whistled and honked from their cars when i walked to the movie theater with my best friend. We need to give youth the knowledge to know the risks of their actions, the structures to be able to come to us when something goes wrong and the opportunity to grow up and connect to their peers. Eliminating cultural artifacts because we don’t understand them does not make our lives any safer, but it does obliterate so many positive interactions.