MySpace may be the space of the moment, receiving praise, aplomb and (most importantly) generating traffic to Google in ever-greater numbers, but it's not even the middle of the social network craze. Really, the whole social network effect, as a theory and a technological practicality, started with the personal web sites of the early nineties. Personal web sites beget blogs beget networking sites like Orkut and LinkedIn beget MySpace, AIM Pages, YouTube, and whatever's to come next.
Thanks to a effort by white shoe management consultancy McKinsey to get the great minds of YouTube, Yahoo! and the like together with the old garde of the gigantic media (and I'm asking myself, and Aaron Cohen of Bolt Media, who was interviewed as a person of knowledge for the Financial Times piece: whither side of the old/new divide does Time Warner fall?), social networking is now coming into the good graces of the giants of Wall Street and Hollywood and Madison Avenue and all those places where fashion and money meet the people.
Robert Young, writing for GigaOm, calls MySpace the "it girl," and describes the infatuation with "her" and her groupies this way: "nearly every media company and venture capital fund on the planet is out on the dance floor stumbling over one another to see if they can identify the next breathless social networking beauty."
He goes further to describe how this phenomenon is not just social networking, but a whole new universe of digital identities, where people are the product and the medium describes us, is us. It's a rather involved argument but what he's really saying is that the technologies that allow us to express ourselves with the least barriers to entry are going to be the most popular. Goodbye Simon Cowell, hello my 1,000 MySpace friends?
I don't know if I buy it entirely: that media will endlessly fragment until people's self-expression becomes the entertainment. But I do agree that people like me (or, more appropriately, like my husband and my dad and my little sisters) will continue to gravitate toward the one that makes it the easiest to look the best. And today: that's not MySpace. In my opinion. Perhaps this is the place where AOL, and AIM Pages, is uniquely positioned to surprise them all and become the next It Girl. Time Warner stockholders can but hope.
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