Friday, March 31, 2006
Murdoch's Myspace purges 200,000 accounts. Not as many as Stalin, company claims. This is part of an ongoing cycle of the growth of the internet.
A site becomes popular as a way to organize and transmit personal information.
The site gets bought by a big company. New rules and censorship is imposed.
The user base goes elsewhere, routing around censorship. The cycle continues.
Examples include hotmail, egroups>onelist>yahoo, now myspace, tomorrow faceparty.
This isn't a bad thing exactly, more of an annoyance.
A site gets popular, usually by providing free services. The founders get to cash out when bought out by BigCo, so the internet knows that they who build popular sites can make $$$ fast, so content providers compete to be the next google or instapundit. The big company knows that pagewiews equal profit... somehow, someday, at least.
1. Build site offering nifty free stuff.
2. If you build it, they will come.. at least sometimes.
3. Where the users are, the big companies that want to corner that internet thing follow, paying big money.
...
....
6. profit.
7. But now there are reputation capital problems - it turns out if you let information be free, some of it will be icky.
So 8, BigCo takes steps to manage its reputation capital problem, by crippling the functionality of the site.
9 which drives the user base away, to a new site that a) isn't broken and b) has some new gimmick to catch the cool kids, where the masses will soon follow.
Library's closing, I didn't get done the main thing I came here to do, there's a tornado warning, and packs of basketball fans roaming the streets - I'll go have some fun. Had big fun last night at metro idol kareoke.
update: there was an amazing lightening storm driving home - downtown was a ghost town - and then tonight i watched cinderella turn into a pumpkin as george mason lost to the florida gators by 15 points - the one basketball game i've seen in about the last 20 years.
update the next thursday:
I happened to check my myspace account, and got a buliten from punkrocknight.com about a charity auction at the vault, a new club downtown. Went, ran into friends,
spent $7 on the charity, a good bit more on drinks and cover, had fun. Myspace can be a timewaster, but it's also a good netwrking tool. Next month's designated charity is a school for AIDS orphans in Kenya being promoted by a Mistress Ann, who has had some of the same problems I've had with Indy's overzealous health and hospital department thugs. I need to remember to send out a blurb about that to some local contacts.
A site becomes popular as a way to organize and transmit personal information.
The site gets bought by a big company. New rules and censorship is imposed.
The user base goes elsewhere, routing around censorship. The cycle continues.
Examples include hotmail, egroups>onelist>yahoo, now myspace, tomorrow faceparty.
This isn't a bad thing exactly, more of an annoyance.
A site gets popular, usually by providing free services. The founders get to cash out when bought out by BigCo, so the internet knows that they who build popular sites can make $$$ fast, so content providers compete to be the next google or instapundit. The big company knows that pagewiews equal profit... somehow, someday, at least.
1. Build site offering nifty free stuff.
2. If you build it, they will come.. at least sometimes.
3. Where the users are, the big companies that want to corner that internet thing follow, paying big money.
...
....
6. profit.
7. But now there are reputation capital problems - it turns out if you let information be free, some of it will be icky.
So 8, BigCo takes steps to manage its reputation capital problem, by crippling the functionality of the site.
9 which drives the user base away, to a new site that a) isn't broken and b) has some new gimmick to catch the cool kids, where the masses will soon follow.
Library's closing, I didn't get done the main thing I came here to do, there's a tornado warning, and packs of basketball fans roaming the streets - I'll go have some fun. Had big fun last night at metro idol kareoke.
update: there was an amazing lightening storm driving home - downtown was a ghost town - and then tonight i watched cinderella turn into a pumpkin as george mason lost to the florida gators by 15 points - the one basketball game i've seen in about the last 20 years.
update the next thursday:
I happened to check my myspace account, and got a buliten from punkrocknight.com about a charity auction at the vault, a new club downtown. Went, ran into friends,
spent $7 on the charity, a good bit more on drinks and cover, had fun. Myspace can be a timewaster, but it's also a good netwrking tool. Next month's designated charity is a school for AIDS orphans in Kenya being promoted by a Mistress Ann, who has had some of the same problems I've had with Indy's overzealous health and hospital department thugs. I need to remember to send out a blurb about that to some local contacts.
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