My concern for a proper recounting and examination of SNS’prehistory isn’t old fogeyism: I believe that a great deal of useful prior knowledge is being ignored or forgotten, only to be reinvented in less “pure,” more inaccessible forms. Beginning your history 20 years into the SNS phenomenon may reify others’ belief that “everything’s new!” I know you know that’s not true, but why sustain a false belief?

Where do things stand now regarding this draft and its completion and publication?

I am a public relation consultant in India and do PR for the first Indian Social Networking Site, Fropper.com Please let me know if you would like to add any indian site to your research study. I shall provide you with the information.

Thank You

Regards
Likhita

it might be a bit off-topic, but i’ve just written a short post about how i’m using a user-centred definition of social media sites in my work with independent media companies. In the post, i classify based on users *expectations* and *behaviours*, rather than features or platforms. I find this helps to describe what platforms actually *do* for users, regardless of whether this was the original intent of the service.

http://www.test.org.uk/archives/002852.html

I can’t address everything in the history because we simply don’t have the room. We are trying to offer “a” history, not the only history. All histories have biases, all histories emphasize some things over others. There’s no stopping point in a history because everything is interconnected so you have to find a place where you choose to scope things and go from there. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the way things have to be. Someone else’s history has to go through the community sites of the past; we simply can’t address all of them or we can’t get to what’s going on now.

-Steve

This is, of course, your research. You are free to define the concepts as you choose, and nobody here has the authority to tell you what to be interested in.

That being said, I find myself squarely on the side of those who have said or implied that the interesting aspects of sites where teens hang out with their friends and/or hang out to meet new friends absolutely do not depend on whether such a site allows your friend/buddy list to be publically viewed. I mean, yeah, the idea that you can “show off” your circle of friends probably is of importance to the kind of personality who, in high school, got off on belonging to the most elite clique (or the most anti-elite rebel anti-clique) and derived their sense of social identity from that display.

I don’t know whether this personality type represents most teens, or even a majority. You would be more likely to have numbers on that than I. But I hope to goodness not. Because these are some sick people!

I think for a moderately sane personality using an SNS the fact that their friends list is public is, perhaps, an interesting secondary benefit, and for the lurker who peruses such a site it makes profile surfing fun and easy. But to imagine that this feature is of such importance that it represents a conceptual divide between fundamentally distinct classes of “computer mediated communication sites which appeal to teens” (my notion of the uber-class of which your difinition of SNS would be a subclass) strains credulity.

I would submit that the real significance of online sites for teens is not that they replaced (or supplemented) the mall, but that they replaced (or supplemented) the telephone. Think on the differences between those metaphors and you’ll see why I regard it as ludicrous to divide teen communication sites conceptually by whether they display your friends list.

To me, the significance of teens online lies in questions like where do you go when you need to talk about things the adults in your life cannot or will not understand, or would embarass you to speak of to other than your peers. Where do you go when the black depression is grinding you down worse than ever and you need somebody (some buddy) who will stay up with you most of the night helping you remember why life is worth staying around for.

Today, most of those sites feature pictures of your friends, associates, “myspace whore trains” or other kinds of chosen ones. Yesterday, many of them did not. If we really want to know how online teen communication got from yesterday to today, it would behoove us to lighten up on the definitionitis and look at the entire process by which online teen communication evolved and continues to evolve.

Just a thought,
-Steve

I can only speak to the first, as a user; however I understand that all three offer greater privacy settings than Facebook and the like. That way, as Multiply’s slogan goes, “…create, share and discuss your blog, photos, videos and music with more of the people you know, and less of the people you don’t.”

Multiply is geared towards the 30s and above group that don’t want to share a lot of information with the general public. For instance, last night I posted one photo album to share with my network (my family, friends and colleagues + their family, friends and colleagues), posted another album for just my family and friends and a third for just five specific people (other than myself).

Thanks for sharing your work.

Someone mentioned AOL, and the AOL chat rooms in the eighties and early nineties were very important groundbreaking sites in the development of sites like MySpace and Facebook. You could also point to something like The Well, which was incredibly influential in developing the Internet as a social gathering place.

I daresay understanding what is similar between The Well and Orkut is more important than analyzing the development of “friend collecting” on MySpace and Friendster. The phenomenon of social networking on the Internet is evolving more into a reflection of complex real-world social groups than the dominance of specific implementations, whether it is MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, or Tagworld.