Business Week came out with an intriguing article titled "Generation Myspace is Getting Fed Up." It confirms my suspicions from glancing at my Myspace and Facebook profiles lately. Social networking sites have seen a 14% reduction in the average time each user spends on the site, and although growth is continuing at an 11.5% clip, that number is way down from past growth rates. Read the article here or here.
So, as a reader of sports blogs or a sports blogger, is this good news or bad news? I hope to address this further at a later date. My immediate impression? This is wonderful news, and my annoyance at Web 2.0 lately may be misplaced. I think there's an opportunity out there for sports blogs to create their own communities of readers. Even better, the sports community leaders like http://www.espn.com and faniq.com imitate many facebook and myspace features. Why better? The article above leads me to believe they may be heading in the wrong direction, and thus sports blogs can still beat these market leaders at their own game. The problem is not only that ads are too pervasive on social networking sites. It's that profile pages are repetitive, boring, and still rather rudimentary, and that it's hard to find creative people and interesting content without excellent searching skills. Also, social networking sites fear giving ordinary users too much power, with the slight exception of Youtube. (The Youtube partnering system is intriguing and worth another bloggolalia post in the future). In my opinion, the way most sports blogs are set up solve many of the problems listed above while still providing a community-driven experience. Your thoughts?
I don't get the "social networking" aspect of the internet; from my (surely limited) perspective, it seems like people are sort of communicating, sort of saying "hi," but not really "communicating," more importantly, not sharing IDEAS. I like blogs because people can share IDEAS. If people don't use a blog feature on their social networking profile page, their page seems to feature nothing but photos, a little bio info, and then one to two line messages. Blogs communicate. Blogs explore ideas. If people want something more than merely saying hello or feeling proud about their number of contacts/friends, then blogs are the place to go.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Pacifist Viking and want to add one more idea.
ReplyDeleteRemember Yahoo! profiles? Same thing as a myspace page except without the trimmings and the trappings and the ability to add friends. But still the hi, here is me idea. Yeah, those went out quick.