In their latest report on Friendster, Nielsen/Netratings reports that average theFriendster user (who logs in) spends nearly 2 hours per day on Friendster, but that they are not yet up at competitive levels with other dating services regarding number of unique viewers.
Anyhow, fascinating data. I truly wonder what Friendster looked like over time. Is the average user spending more time on Friendster than in June? Is the percentage of people who return changing? Are earlier users not loggging in as much? So many interesting data questions…
Danah:
Read the NY Times article and was struck by your understanding. My company has developed language (internal language) to describe what we do with our newslewtters/ezines.
We have over 3 million subscribers to over 75 different publications that are information based.
So we have daily quotations, daily recipes, daily jokes, etc. but each day it is introduced with a BLOG-like paragraph or two fron the writer/editor.
We create a bond (cathexis is the term) and have an informal CQ rating (Cathectic Quotient) that seeks to determine how mcuh bonding the individual writer/editor has with their audience.
Our writers/editors are like disc jockeys with their unique audiences. We get approximately 20,000 emails a day from subscribers.
I would like to discuss this with you. I am not an academic, but believe the Friendster revolution, blogging, flash mobs, and what we do all tap into the same phenomenon.
We are a commercial venture by the way and we actually make money through this process of connection. Developing and fostering “CQ” is what makes our approach a bit different.
Friendster creates connections “mindlessly”, we do it with purpose. People self-select by interests and there is a “group leader”…meaning the writer or editor who feeds information to them.
Please contact me via email at Jaffer@GopherCentral.com and we can explore this.
Jaffer Ali, CEO
GopherCentral.com
Penn Media
Nielsen needs to adjust their ratings for page-load times. That’d bring the numbers more in line.
🙂
Randy