I recently received a mail from my little sister – not so little at 23 – inviting me to come and visit her home page at Bebo.com. I thought well isn’t that nice, my sister has picked up some web design skills and has created her own site. What I didn’t expect to find is that in fact, she is part of a broader social networking community of over 700,000 people globally who also have their own web pages with photos, music and details of their friends.
Let me tell you that I am 31 now and online collaboration, networking and socialising is conducted via the conventional media of e-mail, IM chat and Skype VoIP. I recently invested in a web cam so that I could use it in conjunction with MSN Messenger for socialising with friends living abroad. I am somewhere in the middle of the internet ecosystem when it comes to using information and communication technologies. For god’s sake, I have never Bebo’ed someone or invited them into my ‘circle of friends’. I am wondering if I have finally lost touch with the leading edge of cyber-culture?
Pretty popular
If there is a PC Live! reader over the age of 30 out there with a social networking page on the Web, I would like to hear from you. For this seems to be a youth phenomenon where youngsters between the ages of 12 and 23 are free to communicate with friends in an unprecedented fashion and are also free from the constraints of adult and parental control.
The success of these social networking sites over a short period of time has been nothing short of astounding. Friendster boasts more than 27 million members even though it is less than three years old. MySpace has attracted over 65 million users in the US alone, and has so much potential as the next great advertising vehicle that no less a media mogul than Rupert Murdoch acquired it last year. He sees huge commercial potential in these social networking sites and there are 200 of them in existence with more to follow.
MySpace.com and Tribe.net were brought to life and allowed to blossom by their close alignment to the underground party scene and indie music that the kids are drawn to. You can bet that the marketers will seek to reach to reach this demographic in new and innovative ways and e-commerce promotions will sit alongside subscriber blogs, personal photos and audio streams.
Schools get tough
As Bebo and its alternatives eat up valuable bandwidth, schools, colleges and universities have taken action to clamp down on and restrict the use of these social networking sites in school hours. This drives the students to access these sites in internet cafes and on their home PCs.
My take is that these online networking sites encourage young people to use technology, and experiment with newer technologies like video blogging. This is to be applauded. What is slightly more sinister is that there are social networking sites out there that focus on younger kids.
The kids are using these services unsupervised and may be involved in activities and social scenarios that are inappropriate for people of their age. This is where parents – the older generation who use more conventional ICT mediums – need to take a genuine interest in these leading edge communication media so they can keep track of exactly what their kids are doing on their PCs.
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