Fascinating unedited record from a talk about MySpace, by danah boyd (sic), who is a PhD student in the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley and a researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. She gave the talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Conference in February 2006. Here is an extract from its introduction:
I have been following MySpace since its launch in 2003. Initially, it was the home to 20-somethings interested in indie music in Los Angeles. Today, you will be hard pressed to find an American teenager who does not know about the site, regardless of whether or not they participate. Over 50 million accounts have been created and the majority of participants are what would be labeled youth - ages 14-24. MySpace has more pageviews per day than any site on the web except Yahoo! (yes, more than Google or MSN).
There is plenty of other interesting research into young people's informal learning with digital media taking place at Berkeley.
6/4/2005. See also this 21/3/2006 essay by danah boyd, which compares MySpace with an earlier social software service called Friendster.
Updated 20060406
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