My Space a Social Network Site

The phenomenon of the Social Network Sites (SNS) on the web has created a multitude of fits and starts with many sites emerging just long enough to create a spin-off site which then moved on to create yet another site. Many of the SNS are still around others are merely a footnote in the relatively short history of the Internet. The SNS that I have chosen to report on is My Space. It seems lately all I hear about this site is how bad it is and how little the site seems to care about the safety of the minors who are using their site. I wanted to know more about this site mainly because I tend to field more questions about this site that any other site in my technology class. Students invariably want to know why they cannot check on/work on their My Space page. However the authors (Boyd, Ellison, 2007) of the report on SNS seem to indicate that the unsafe nature of sites such as My Space seems to be somewhat over blown/reported. So I did a google search using the keywords My Space Issues. I received back 70,2000,000 hits the top most hit coming from the New York Times in a piece they reported on in 2007. So, I wonder has the furor over the predator issue been over blown or over reported? I am not sure but I do know that this particular site is number one on the hit list amongst parents I have talked to about Social Network Sites!

My Space was started hundreds of miles away from Silicon Valley in Santa Monica California just as another site Friendster was considering making some major changes that would eventually alienate it from some of its most ardent supporters. My Space apparently saw the handwriting on the wall and decided to attract the indie band segment of the Internet by embracing all bands and allowing them to use their site to promote themselves. This then attracted their fan base, which then attracted some teenagers to the site. Once this happened the site took off. My Space also enamored themselves with their users by allowing them to modify the look of their site with HTML code. The site also started to grow due to word of mouth and the ease of use their site promoted amongst the copy and paste generation that was looking for a site to express themselves on while keeping in touch with friends and musical groups.

My Space was eventually purchased for 580 million dollars in 2005. In the You Tube video “Shift Happens” the authors create a chart indicating how long it took various forms of communication media to reach a target audience of 50 million. Radio took approximately 38 years to reach this mark; television took 13 years the computer a mere 4 years to reach this target audience. The video goes on to point out that as of when the video was made there have been over 60,000,000 visitors to My Space since 2005, that 230,000 people signed up during the course of a day, and that if My Space were a country it would be the eighth largest in the world.

Yes, there are many opportunities for the internet to lead you astray, but the upside of the internet so outweighs the down side that ignoring the potential would be akin to standing in the ocean and trying to kick back the waves of the incoming tide. You will eventually expend all of your energy and the ocean will have swirled in around you and engulfed you.

I personally do not have a My Space/Facebook type of site mainly because I never considered the up side to getting myself out their in the web 2.0 experience. I will probably hold off a little longer mainly because I now have a blog site, a ning site, and a wiki. This has created a much more open side to me than I had even 3 weeks ago. I will stick with these for now and see where they take me.