In a comment that exceeds my post, James brings up an interesting point that I missed:
That demo[graphic that] you note is critical and different in more ways than most imagine. For one they are not as willing to become static consumers of media. Not only do they want to share…they want to create. It’s why at my place we’ve refered to that group as the “content generation.”
I don’t like the term “content generation,” but the Gen Y and later generations certainly behave differently than those that came before. Participation Generation (for which there are shockingly few Google results as of this moment) is a better epithet, though too much of a mouthful. The under-25s have never been in a world that had three dominant broadcast TV channels or believed mobile phones to be novel. They expect to sound off when they want, how they want, and to be able to web-publish the results. That presents even a further challenge for the mindset of traditional corporate media management and further complicated Friendster’s evolution.
Unlike many other people, I don’t think Friendster’s funding or hiring Scott Sassa had a single thing to do with the company’s loss of momentum. The specific Friendster board members at Benchmark and Kleiner are on the boards of eBay and Google. They clearly know how to grow giant dotcoms. Instead, does anyone remember the Fakester controversy of almost exactly two years ago? I think Friendster began to lose momentum at the moment Jonathan told his users that their playfulness and passion were spam — and started deleting their accounts. Friendster is still a huge site; one that could be rejuvenated with a little fresh thinking. However, there’s been a ton of social network growth since then, and Friendster has not benefited.
Fakesters were Friendster users attempt to bend the system to their own fanciful whims. They built elaborate accounts for their pets, various deities, politicians, and landmarks they loved like the Brooklyn Bridge. Hundreds (at least) of soft-porn actresses and pinup girls also jumped in and were running informal fan clubs on Friendster. Friendster’s founder decided that this was inappropriate use of the site and deleted thousands upon thousands of accounts. The cascading outcries, events, and spoofs went beyond the normal blogging outcry:
- A Manifesto — complete with Che Guevera illustration, whose prediction and reasoning are perfect,
- Real-world protests,
- Commentary about the futility of real-world Fakester protests,
- Pretendster, the Fakester authoring tool, and of course,
- The essential, lame Fakester flipflop for cash from Friendster one year later.
Instead, if Jonathan found a way to accommodate hundreds of thousands passionate users who were doing a ton of free work on his behalf, I don’t think we would have ever heard of MySpace. The pets example is the clearest. In the Fakester purge, Friendster is reputed to have deleted 300,000 pet accounts. As a spoof, one of the funniest guys I know set up Dogster and Catster. It’s still funny but no longer just a joke. The two sites now have 150,000 active pet owners, a bunch of unregistered traffic, and a great little business that does whatever the heck pet owners want and gets paid nicely for it.
[Ed. Note: The Wikipedia entry for Fakester looks like it was rewritten by Friendster PR, and I'm too lazy to fix it.]
Sounds like you’re onto something. After all, we’re referring to a generation that has been completing grade school homework in PowerPoint for years. The tools of production are no longer precious. In the same way David Lettermen’s irony demystified broadcast TV (and knocked it off its pedestal) for millions in my generation, the tools of net-worked media are eliminating the last barriers to mass ownership…as opposed to mass media. So perhaps the right moniker — and there are no age limits in my mind — is the “ownership” generation.
I was considering “ownership” but I wanted to duck all the copyright issues which these folks may re-configure as well.
The average Dogster and Catster user is 32, many of whom live far from digerati centers, but they still are very interested in sharing and participating.
This implies to me that you didn’t have to grow up in Gen Y to expect everything to be “always on.” Anyone spending time online for a couple years is ready to take advantage of of creating media, of sharing, of getting to participate. The Participation Generation (that was my favortite of all the suggested names
may actually be better titled the Era of Participation or The Participation Decade, because it’s denizens, I believe, span many generations right now.
Ted, I am specifically implying that growing up never having known a world before the always-on Interent is different. You and I adapt reasonably well and have made a huge amount of room in our habits for always-on, but i bet we still don’t “get it.” i.e. I’m ok at learning other languages, but I’ll never be a native speaker of anything but English.
To clarify, at thirtyfew years old, your users are very happy with your interface. A more flexible one (like myspace) might intimidate them or simply be lost on them.
Scott, very interesting post. I love the name participation generation, really gets to the heart of what Gen Y is all about. It speaks nicely to the importance of remixing and the need for media to be more than just a passive experience. I like.
As for the Friendster thing, I think you’ve got a point, but I also think it’s bigger than just that. I really believe that social networking for social networking’s sake won’t ever really survive. Myspace has done especially well connecting people through music. The social networking is really a sort-of secondary activity, as it is in our real lives. I think the only place where the kind of Friendster model works is when you’re in a contained space, like a college campus (which is why facebook has been so successful). Otherwise, why do I care about meeting this person who likes the same music as me that’s three times removed as a friend and lives six hours away?
Noah, aren’t you underlining my point?
–The Fakesters were effectively the same as the Tribes on Tribe.net.
–The Brooklyn Bridge’s friends were largely people that went out of their way to be on the Lower East Side or in Williamsburg.
– Wharton’s School of Business’s friends were students and alumni there.
–My pet’s friends were other pet lovers with whom I shared a common interest, which is why Dogster’s is kicking (and sniffing) butt.
–The friends of the models draped over hotrods in SoCal need not be explained.
Friendster had the ability to be the umbrella for thousands of communities of interest, a few of which went to Dogster, and many more of which went to MySpace and Facebook. Being slavish to user needs and opening up a couple APIs would have changed a lot.
A very good point. I do however think it’s about more than just playfulness and there’s a serious need to add a value beyond just meeting random people from random places (which the fakesters certainly allow for).
I cut my response down and removed some statements. In case they change your mind any I’ll add them.
Our users from day one have expected many features from the site. Just becasue we don;t offer them, doesn’t mean they don’t ask for them. Besides the success of the site, the thing that surprised me the most was the high expectation of features the users asked for, in fact they demanded.
Lots of our users have been on the web for five plus years. Lots of them are online people. They use lots of sites and expect very advanced capabilities. They put up with not having them, but I’m always surprised at the level of features they do expect.
So I’m gonna stick with my original opinion that this is a societal change not just generational. Though I will agree that gEnpArtiCiPaTion is leading the movement.
Ted, I didn’t say feature-poor, I said flexible. If you look at the MySpace tools, you can do basically perform any weird CSS transform you want (which Friendster appears to have copied as of this morning). I’m under the impression that your users can do a lot, but not enought to disorient the visitors to their pet pages as certainly happens on myspace.
They’d try if we offered it ;>
Similarly, Friendster tried to work with movie studios and other mainstream media that attempts to serve all audiences. MySpace worked the niches early, providing nichy music options for many, many segments.
[...] Warner understands the future of reaching the youth audience (see the participation audience.) They get it. You see, the definition of Mass Media is changing from Media Made FOR an Audience - to - Media Made BY the Audience. This media is social in nature and the under 24 crowd are hungry for it. Take a look at The Veronicas’ Web Site and see for yourself. The site is divided between branded content pushed down by the label and social media created by the artists and their fans. Embracing social media is an opportunity to build deeper relationships with an audience with the additional benefit of engaging customers through lifestyle marketing efforts they respond to. The Veronicas are a set of twins from Brisbane, Australia whose first song, 4Ever, will be forever drilled into your forever grateful brain by the eternal (gotcha!) generosity of every radio and television show in the modern world. In addition to the label’s standard issue tour date info, music video, and downloads the girls are utilizing a dazzling variety of social media tools and services to reach their audience. Street teams. Open-source forums. MySpace page. A TextAmerica photoblog. A Diary. [...]
[...] News Corp shareholders are always faced with the same problem. Rupert keeps picking Pride over Greed. He’s doing it again, so far on a limited basis, with the way that MySpace complaints are being managed. If these missteps become a trend, it will be just another story of traditional telecoms and content players showing up with too much money and not enough trust in their user base. Second-guessing your users is the perfect formula for losing your investment — even when the investment theory is sound. [...]