5 Things for the Future of Social Networking--Facebook's "Social Graph"

This last post is an extra bit I thought I'd share. I thought it would be interesting to do a more forward looking post that postulates some potential directions that Social Networking could take in the future. This is mostly a combination of my own thinking as well as conversations with industry experts, such as my brother, who is a Senior Director in Corporate Strategy and Acquisitions at Microsoft.

After discussing with him some of the key components for what is to become of current social networks I have found that many of them use crowdsourced information from social networking sites and other online data. I will talk about the following concepts and explain how they work with examples of what they are.

1. Mobile (mobile friend finder using gps, etc.)

Location-based services have been around, and mobile applications such as Google Latitude, Loopt, Foursquare.com are utilizing GPS to identify people's friends and alert their friends of each other's whereabouts. Basically, the GPS data is sent to these programs through service providers and that information is filtered by the programs and sent back to the service to the individual with the smart phone. Also, they will make it much easier to upload photos, videos, etc. to Facebook from your phone. So now people are not only virtually communicating in the virtual and digital world that Facebook is, but people are using data to meet up and actually be physically present with their friends. As we have discussed, there are major privacy concerns and other issues around location-based services, however, in time I believe many of these issues can be resolved and/or made not so harmful."

2. More granular permissions (e.g. easier to share some photos with subgroups, not with others)

This is basically the ability to create extremely detailed ‘contact lists’. Facebook has made this possible so now one can have a ‘college friends’, ‘family’, ‘work friends’, ‘professional contacts’ etc. lists so you can filter your news feed by these lists and change your privacy settings for each. For example, you don’t want coworkers to see your photo albums so you can prevent them from seeing those. Well, in the future these lists are going to be more and more important. The idea is that, in the end game, you can actually have many profiles in one application (Facebook), so you don’t need to have a separate LinkedIn account for professional contacts, etc. You just have different versions of yourself that you expose to your different contacts based on what list they are in. And, by the way, there is another huge advantage to doing this, which is that it makes the News Feed algorithm much smarter. The more data you give the service about the nature of your relationship with your contact, the more easily the algorithm can filter the most relevant stuff. For example, I can even tell my news feed that I want more feeds about ‘friends’, ‘family’ and less about ‘coworkers’, so the feeds I get are more relevant to what I’m looking for. In the past couple hours, CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent out a statement about altering the way Facebook users control their privacy settings. Now that networks have become so large, limiting people from seeing content on your personal profile by choosing social networks is too broad. Facebook is allowing users to modify their privacy setting in this granular sense that I have been talking about. Instead of having you networks have different permissions, you, the user gets to decide what content you would like to share with whom.

3. Extension of your social network into activities beyond the facebook walled garden (e.g. will see what movies your friends are renting on netflix)

This is a reference to Facebook Connect. Facebook is fast becoming the ‘identity platform’ for the Internet, in that they now let you use your Facebook ID to log in to Amazon and 3^rd party sites (anyone who is a Facebook Connect member). The reason Amazon uses Facebook Connect is for the following reasons:

A) They can then push feeds about you back into your contacts’ Facebook news feeds (e.g. “Connor just bought this book about honey bees on Amazon.com” shows up in your Facebook contacts’ news feeds.

B) Amazon can suck out your ‘social graph’ information so they know who your contacts on Amazon are, which lets them make better product recommendations to you on Amazon. So basically there will be a ‘social filter’ applied to all your activities outside of the social networks themselves, so that everything you do is a bit smarter. All shopping, entertainment, travel planning, etc. can use your social filter to better personalize their experiences and even tell you what your contacts’ are doing on those sites.

4. Super smart 'news feed' that uses sophisticated algorithms so that we only see the most interesting feeds (e.g. my dad sees feeds related to his stocks, mom to shopping, I see feeds to stanford sports, etc.)

It’s like applying a Google-like super intelligent algorithm to rank the ‘relevance’ of various potential feeds that can be exposed in your news feed. Think about it – if you have 1000 contacts each generating 10 ‘feeds’ (i.e., activities online that are interesting, e.g. (‘Fritz just posted this pic or bought this book on Amazon’) then that’s 10000 feeds / day that the News Feed could show you – which is a massive amount of ‘feed noise’ to filter through. As both the number of contacts grow and the number of ‘feeds’/person / day grows, this problem gets exponentially harder. This is why you need the granular ‘lists’ that provide a lot of ‘context’ on the nature of your relationships with your various contacts. The ‘Feed algorithm’ is going to have to make super hard decisions about what 10 feeds to show out of the tens of thousands that are happening in your ‘social graph’. Not an easy computer science problem. Sounds a lot like Search. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, started a company called FriendFeed to focus on pulling your social feeds (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube) together and ranking them with an algorithm. He sold it to Facebook. So clearly Facebook gets that this is a huge problem / huge potential benefit to end users and that’s why they bought FriendFeed AND why they have redesigned the homepage again to be more ‘relevance based’ than simply ‘chronological’ (requiring no filters).

5. Better search capabilities / emergence of 'human question and answer' service within a social network (e.g. yahoo answers inside facebook)

The only market that Google has not dominated has been Korea – there is a service there called Naver that dominates ‘search’ instead. Rather than using a super powerful algorithm to filter the billions of websites and rank them, Naver provides Koreans with a great platform for posting questions and having the community answer them. As many people answer questions, over time Naver produces a huge repository of human-generated responses to human-asked questions. Since humans are way smarter than machines (machines are just faster) – the relevance of those answers is way better than what any computer algorithm can produce. So, Google can’t compete because Naver owns this repository of human answers to any question you can think of. It’s likely that Facebook could try and build a similar service. They could make it easy to ask your contacts a question, and then over time if you ask a question that has been answered before you no longer have to wait for the answer – they will just show you the historical answers that were rated the best by the community. Facebook could compete with Google here, which is why Google is scared of Facebook and is creating this program called OpenSocial. Which is basically an attempt to reduce Facebook’s exclusive ownership of / commoditize the ‘social graph’. Google’s greatest fear is Facebook building this repository of ‘answers’ that Google cannot index.

Facebook's Big Privacy Changes-Zuckerberg Letter-Social Networking Future

An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg

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by Mark Zuckerberg Today at 6:23pm

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we've built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we'll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You'll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you're finished, we'll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you're done you'll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you're sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.


Mark Zuckerberg

The Future of Social Networking...or is there?

To conclude my blog, I thought that it would be interesting to see where social networking's future lies, or even if there is a future at all. I stumbled upon a blog called 'PDA The Digital Content Blog' and there was an article about a conversation that took place at Oxford University last Monday, where multiple CEOs of social networking sites came to discuss whether or not social networks are the Internet's last big development. The first to speak was Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal. He reminded everyone of where in history we are. Explaining that in 2002 even experts missed the fact that Google was the number one search engine. He posits the idea that we don't know whether we are in the early or late stage, and that we are maybe at the end of Internet innovation in it's entirety. This seems largely out of proportion because there are sites that are expanding and opening themselves up to new forms of technology and ideas.

One of these is Twitter. One of Twitter's cofounders Biz Stone, weighs in with the idea that he believes "in a trend of openness". He explains that Twitter is not a social networking site rather a "information network". This is absolutely true because it has been used in political situations like the Iranian election protests. Stone says, "On a large scale, the open exchange of information can even lead to positive global impact. If people are more informed they are more engaged, and if they are more engaged they are more empathic. They are global citizens, not just a citizen of a nation." If we look at the Obama election, we see a very similar methodology where open-endedness, open-information were used in order to get so many people more involved in the election. The future seems to be here, that rapid contribution from individuals to mass audiences is the fastest, most efficient way that information is transfered. This is interesting because people who make measly 140 character tweets are helping change the world just by spreading information. However, this does not necessarily guarantee longevity for social networks.

This is when Ram Shriram, a founding board member of Google, weighed in. He said, "Combining social and mobile-there is a new wave of opportunities coming up, a growth of users, so mobile internet is clearly the next major computing cycle. And this time this didn't start in the US, but in Asia and Europe form where it is going to the US." The way in which people use mobile devices to access data in these places is such that of a desktop computer user. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are the main wave of opportunity and creation of information--the social is the now. Shriram states, "There will be new distribution and consumption patterns which will impact society". He even makes predictions that Facebook will replace email, chat will become a multimedia format, and that Apple will be successful because of its strong mobile focus. A very bold prediction in my mind is that Facebook will replace email because there are so many email platforms available. But, I could see it being used more and more as people are finding that opening mail in different platforms inconvenient. Also since Facebook has taken on this WebOS approach, there has been less and less time spent on other applications other than Facebook's. However, I do not think that it will ever amount to Mac OS or Windows--Biz Stone might say this is close-minded.

The last CEO to weigh in was Reid Hoffman, a graduate from Stanford who founded LinkedIn. He says, "I actually think we are just beginning to see how people launch the eventualities of social network into their life" and he compares this to how 'mobile phones had grown from a tool for bankers to a part of everyone's life'. The interesting and good point Hoffman make sis that people treat online information like ice cream. He says, "It is not nutritious, but people still eat it." I think that this is valid because people will always eat up information that is on social networks, we loved being entertained and one of the biggest components of entertainment is gossip. But, this still doesn't answer the questions posed. Where is social networking going? Is it stagnate? Is this the end? Hoffman believes this isn't the end and that with all of this data, you have a breeding ground for new applications.

Oxford lecturer, Dr.. Kate Blackmon summed up the discussion with the idea that 'the future was not about crowd sourcing but crowd filtering.' So social networks must find ways to make use of the stream of information that is being poured into them. I would agree with Biz Stone idea that social networks must follow the trend of openness. It will be the challenge of figuring out how we can utilize this massive amount of data, how social networking data can be used to create applications that both serve the world and help the individual. Twitter may be a strong example of what the future of social networks looks like, a crowdsourced data hub in which people filter information that they want to get the latest news. In cases of politics and disasters, Twitter shows that it can help the world and the individual. However, I am not so sure that all social networks will have this capability to move in this direction. In addition, I believe that there will be a ton of innovation around making data more relevant, more easily accessible, and more accurate. For me there does not seem to be an end for social networks, but rather an end to the lack of use social networking data.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/nov/24/future-of-social-networks-twitter-linkedin-mobile-application-next

Oldbook. When Grandma posts on your wall.

Oldbook--the new Facebook, but a separate site from those older than forty. This is perhaps the only solution to the up and coming scare that Facebook is facing. Well, maybe not the only solution, since creating separate networks based off age would cause problems for those on the border line. But let's continue.

I love my Grandma. Don't get me wrong. She is as sweet as Grandma's get. HOWEVER, when she friended me about two months ago I saw about 70% of my Facebook freedom disappear or rather been eradicated by my new privacy settings. After she half-learned how to use Facebook, she began to use the Facebook status bar to respond to her personal emails. She wrote, "Dear Connor, Please send me the photos of the museum event. Love, Grams" This appeared on my mini-feed along with ten of my friends' mini feeds. Not terribly embarrassing, but I saw another 20% of my privacy disappear. She then proceeded the last two weeks to actually write on my wall. And so, I found myself completely censored. I could no longer be myself with out receiving a wall post saying, "You know Grams doesn't approve.". That hurts. Apparently, I am not the only one to notice this. "When you start getting friended by your grandmother, I think that's when it starts to lose its cool," said Huw Griffiths, evp and global director of marketing accountability and research at Interpublic Group's Universal McCann.

Steve McClellan poses the question, "Is Facebook Getting uncool for 18-24s?" According to multiple media agencies, this is a fact and they have data to prove it-- "According to comScore, the average number of minutes spent online with the site among 18- to 24-year-olds fell in September for the third consecutive month compared to the same period a year ago. And the drop-off rate is accelerating. In July, usage fell 3 percent, in August 13 percent and in September 16 percent."

The belief that it is similar to Myspace losing its trendiness is valid. Also, that growth in older people's use of the site has turned some 18-24s away. But, I do not think that it is the invasion of Facebook by older people. That is not the problem. If Facebook was considered uncool by this age group, we would see a complete abandoning of the site. In reality I don't think that the data is accurate since it does not take into account mobile phone usage. With the invention and development of the iPhone and other smart phones we are beginning to see a tremendous amount of Internet usage via mobile phones, almost half of which use their phones for social networking. see chart

Facebook is not like Myspace in that the loss of the 18-24s age group will not immediately crash the entire site. The Facebook Platform will maintain activity since many are using it like an operating system. I do not see a near end to Facebook, however, the growing population of older users will generate a loss in 18-24s.

Facebook=Myspace+Brains

Facebook is commonly referred to as, "Myspace + Brains", which is somewhat truthful if you look at some of the Facebook statistics:

General Growth

• More than 300 million active users
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older

User Engagement

• Average user has 130 friends on the site
• More than 8 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 45 million status updates each day
• More than 10 million users become fans of Pages each day

Applications

• More than 2 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 14 million videos uploaded each month
• More than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
• More than 3 million events created each month
• More than 45 million active user groups exist on the site

International Growth

• More than 70 translations available on the site
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

At least, the developers are the people with the brains. So how did they do it? Development, presentation, platform, and mobile.

Platform

• More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
• Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
• More than 350,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
• More than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users
• More than 15,000 websites, devices and applications have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008

The developers (all one million of them) have created a personal profile page that is easy to navigate, clean, and organized. In comparison to a Myspace page, which is more like digital vomit than a personal profile, Facebook appeals to users and appeals to users' friends. It does not allow embedded HTML and CSS, which Myspace does. The advantage here is not allowing users to create large swathes of profile pages or to embed hidden links to viruses which poses security risks. There is a disadvantage of limiting customization options, but Facebook makes up for it with Facebook Applications and the Facebook Platform. Facebook utilizes a different method to allow users to be more involved with their personal pages while avoiding inherent security and unattractiveness risks. The platform allows developers to create applications of anything imaginable, from the useful to the irrelevant. Since there are so many options on Facebook, how can one be bored? Apparently, they don't get very bored. (see chart). Facebook writes, "a Facebook application uses Facebook Platform to access information from the social graph, offering users an experience that's relevant to them". Facebook's Platform is considered a Web Operating System (WebOS), where its applications are taking the place of those on other operating systems because they are easier to use and free. People do everything on Facebook now, and that is why it has become so popular.

One ingenious, yet simple marketing technique that Facebook used to generate its user base so quickly was the automated e-vites new users could send out to their friends in seconds. After joining, you upload your typical e-mail contact list and Facebook uses those e-mails to send an e-vite with your name on it inviting your friends to join. The next level was Facebook Mobile, a powerful yet, simple method of making the site more accessible.

Mobile

• There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

Looking these statistics Facebook is clearly taking advantage of the growth in Internet use on mobile phones. People can check their page, update their status, and check the statuses of others almost instantly. All of these methods have created a tremendous social networking site, that has become a WebOS and does not seem to be faltering. However, I do think there are a couple of challenges it must overcome.

So I pose a question to the Facebook Developers:

With the growing usage of the Internet on mobile devices, it seems as though Facebook activity will occur mostly on mobile devices in the future. Facebook even says,"People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users." Doesn't using mobile devices assume limitations on the usage of Facebook applications and thus eliminate the addictiveness of the site?

Lastly, whether these strategies can maintain growth and constant activity is another matter. Facebook has yet to be complained about for being used inappropriately--at least in the way Myspace has. However, this seems very unavoidable as it continues to grow. In order to fund such technological expansion to match network growth Facebook will have to find another way gain revenue, which will be a challenge. Plus there is growing number of privacy-related complaints.

Twitter: Self-Expression Tool Becomes Useful in Emergencies, Marketing, Politics and Education

Since its creation by software programmer Jack Dorsey in 2006, Twitter has caught fire. As of April 29, 2009 it had 20 million worldwide users, called “tweeters”. In comparison, relative “old-timers” Facebook and Orkut had fewer than 15 million users worldwide.[1] Users post information (tweet) on their user page in brief 140 character or less messages (microblogs), and “followers” subscribe to the online tweets which are sent to their cell phones, PDA’s and computers. The name “twitter’ was adopted because it literally means “short bursts of inconsequential information” and Dorsey wanted to be able to SMS any device not just phones, and also to be able to tweet from anywhere.[2] In fact, it has been called the “SMS of the internet” and had its roots in emergency dispatch, where firemen and policemen can get up-to-date information in crises.[3]1 It is not strictly a social networking site, as the communication is usually one-way and the transmission is to many followers generally with no personal relationship with the user/tweeter.

Twitters appeal appears at first superficial and narcissistic and people use it to microblog about themselves. Even the founding document of the company, which is a sketch of the original idea in 2000, lists relatively inconsequential activities such as “in bed” or “going to park”.2 Rapid uptake by celebrities catalyzed huge groups of followers on twitter, who wanted to know their favorite celebrities every move.

Criticism of Twitter has included its potential inaccuracy, however inaccurate information is also sent via email (spam) or SMS (spam). One difference with Twitter is that you at least know who is sending you the information. Although your response to the inaccurate reporter will likely be ignored, you can tweet the fact that a given reporter is spreading falsehoods. It is testimony to the success of Twitter that very little change to the platform’s feature set has been made since 2006, except for the addition of search.³ The search feature also enables you to check on the accuracy or inaccuracy of information. A simple real-time search on “Swine Flu” or “#swineflu” on twitter.com will reveal results such as “time for people to stop eating pigs!”; and “This pigflu thing seems quite bad, you might even call it a hamdemic”.¹ However, you can go to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to get accurate information at http://twitter.com/cdcemergency.

Interestingly, the early uptake of Twitter was motivated by self-interest and self-expression, and the high drop-out rate of 40% per year may reflect that the followers grow weary of their celebrities’ rants. However, although the software has not changed, the platform has certainly grown to be used in many other productive ways. For example, (and true to Jack Dorsey’s insight into emergency dispatch) the American Red Cross uses Twitter to keep its staff and volunteers up to the minute on unfolding crises. In the San Diego wildfires, people were able to update their friends and neighbors more quickly than TV or radio. President Obama used Twitter to broadcast his positions and comments on current events and issues. In China, students are taught English by asking them to Twitter messages on certain topics. Manufacturers use Twitter not only to advertise but to put out useful information such as rebates or warranty information to their customers. Like Wikipedia, news may be obtained more quickly on Twitter than on conventional news sites. And because of the search feature, facts can be checked relatively easily.

What began as a short burst of inconsequential information, has evolved into a useful platform for getting very fresh information to followers with specific interests and needs.

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[1] D’Monte L. Swine flu’s tweet tweet causes online flutter. Business Standard. April 29, 2009. http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/swine-flu%5Cs-tweet-tweet-causes-online-flutter/356604/

[2] Sarno, David. Twitter creator Jack Dorsey illuminate the site’s founding document. Part I. Los Angeles Times. Feb. 18, 2009. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-creator.html

[3] Sarno, David. Jack Dorsey on the Twitter ecosystem, journalism and how to reduce reply spam. Part II. Los Angeles Times. Feb, 19, 2009. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/jack-dorsey-on.html

Friendster Falls, Myspace Rises

I read an interesting article that outlines the definition and history of multiple social networking websites that we all know and love. What sparked my interest is how Friendster's marketing choices led to the rise of Myspace. And, more importantly, how self-interest motivated users of Friendster to move into the free and personal world of Myspace. One of the main ways Myspace evolved was through music communities that formed between indie artists and their fans who rapidly found the interests of other fans very much aligned with their own. Essentially, Myspace cater toward users economic self-interest and thus a community began to develop. But before I go into detail, I want to explain the basis for how Myspace was able to be successful.

In 2003, Myspace was launched to compete with Friendster, Xanga, and AsianAvenue. Myspace sought to fulfill the interests of Friendster users by marketing their site as a free tool rather than a fee-based system which is what Friendster was adopting. Another key factor in the move from Friendster to Myspace was the ability to customize one's personal profile. By targeting the interests of the Friendster users by creating a free and fully customizable social networking site, the rapid shift from Friendster to Myspace commenced. What happened here was that the users of Friendster were actually posting messages on where to find cheaper, better sites such as Myspace. Again a direct catering to economic self-interest. What intrigues me is that the indie music sub population that was expelled from Friendster for not complying with the site's policies jump-started Myspace completely, along with the connections between fans based on similar interest.

The indie bands and their fans was a symbiotic relationship that Myspace did not really see coming but opened its arms to as soon as the Myspace population started growing. Local bands around the Los Angeles area (near Santa Monica, CA where Myspace was founded) sought out the economic opportunity of creating fan bases using this new hot and free social networking site. Not only would local fans follow this lead, thousands of other bands and ten of thousands of fans fueled the Myspace fire. The bands and fans dynamic is one that is mutually beneficial, each group having its own interests in mind and as a result creating a community that benefits from these self-interests. Bands could connect to fans and fans could become "Friends" with the bands to feel more connected to them. As this dynamic developed, it also allowed fans to discuss their favorite bands with each other, again highlighting how important this band-fan relationship was for the development of Myspace. But without this dynamic would Myspace even exist today? Surely there can be money poured into the site, but I would think not. The fundamental principle that Myspace is built on is it ability to accommodate the interests of its users and in doing so it creates a symbiotic community that mutually benefits. To be more specific, Myspace also brought in constant change and a diverse set of tools for its users to fulfill their needs--"features".

Myspace also constantly updated its site with new "features" such as the "Myspace Blog". I actually ran a quick search on Google to see how the impact these "features" had on the shift from Friendster to Myspace and guess what popped up? Five different links to Myspace Blogs talking about how much better they liked Myspace.

This of course is the result Myspace wants to see, and the method of using a "me" type interface allowed it to be successful. Also, it success was determined on a few other key factors. One, by becoming a free site, Myspace generated thousands of users that were already using Friendster--the catering to the economic self-interest. Two, band-fan dynamic was a symbiotic relationship that proved how Myspace's catering to its user's self-interest creates a mutually beneficial environment. Third, Myspace constantly created "features" to allow its users to fulfill their interests and needs, which in turn helped everyone as users shared ideas on "Myspace Blog". So Myspace's success was largely drawn from the catering to self-interest, and specifically economic self-interest as the site became free.