danah ponders what it means to be a 'hotter' social networking service:

[from apophenia: "Move Over Friendster..."] So, waking up to the Mercury News exclaiming Move over, Friendster. There's a hotter site on the Web made me ROFL. Hotter? To who? By what standard? If you follow this space, you know that MySpace has had more traffic than Friendster for a long time. They have fewer accounts, more loyalty, more freedom and generally a much more youth-friendly culture. Their popularity is mostly amongst users who never got into the fad of Friendster: goth kids, indie rock kids and youth. In the last six months, most of the urban teens i talk to talk about MySpace. If you're in college, you're on Facebook but if you're in high school, you're probably on MySpace. The only reason to say "Move Over Friendster" is because Friendster never really recovered its hyped status in the States and while its popularity overseas continues to grow, the media here has declared it a fad.

Adults generally don't watch teens as an indicator of what will happen to the market or society as a whole, unless they are trained to do so. There is a self-centeredness in being older, somehow (said the 51 year-old, bald, fat, white guy). Witness the ongoing debate about instant messaging -- which kids think of as a staple -- but which continues to be a generational split in the business setting. When I have presented the notion of a future decrease in email use, based on the preferences of young people, to older digerati -- like I did last year at Supernova -- you can be tarred and feathered. Friendster explicitly wanted business professionals to use its service. Last year, it sent out a plea to lapsed users who met their profile to please, please come back. Meanwhile, MySpace quietly focussed on serving a community -- the indie music scene -- and accumulated along the way various demographics intensely interested in socializing around music. But self-identification based on music preference is not a fad: it is a constant.

[tags: MySpace, Friendster]