Speaking with a friend recently about the fickleness of users, we inevitably came to the discussion of social networks and how users simply abandon one for the next.
The recent exodus from MySpace to Facebook, based solely on the amount of friend invites for Facebook in my inbox, would probably suggest how MySpace users are tired and bored of what they offer and see that Facebook has something at the least different. But in reality, there is probably more playing into this. Aside from MySpace’s spam issues and poor usability, user engagement has begun to dwindle. One of MySpace’s greatest points of bringing users back was the friend invite. A friend signs up and they want to connect, hence you come back and probably poke around the site for a bit while you’re at it. Eventually all your friends have signed up and you’ve connected with them all. It’s almost like collecting baseball cards. But once you’ve completed the set, now what?
The now what question seems to be the point at which users move on to something else. For some reason we as internet users have no problem creating new accounts, re-entering all the same data, uploading the same photos, and sending out invites to all the same people. Simply to start the same process over again.
Luckily, engagement is certainly evolving and the more modern social network tools are providing a reason to come back, and more than just to accept a friend invite. We can only hope that once you finish collecting your friends’ profiles you’ll be able to do more with them than just admiring your friend count.
12.04.07 — Culture, User Experience
Photographs of our planet are so commonplace to many of us that we don’t even really think about it. Imagery of our planet has always existed in my lifetime. It was only recently that I even thought to realize that in my father’s own lifetime, photographs of our planet from space did not exist. The first photograph of Earth from space was taken by the Explorer 6 satellite in 1959. My dad was 8 years old at the time.
The image above is not the photo taken by Explorer 6
10.23.07 — Culture, Personal
As a Mac-using freshman in 2000 at Northeastern University’s College of Computer & Information Science, I was pretty much a joke to everyone–mostly due to my computer, but okay, that could be debated. The all too often question was, “how are you gonna do computer science on a Mac?” Surprisingly, I did just fine, and before I knew it, a lot of people were picking up on the Mac trend. By the time I graduated a lot had changed in the Mac world and surprisingly, I actually knew a handful of other people who owned Macs.
But when I saw the below photo taken by Mollie Sterling of a classroom at her alma mater, The Missouri School of Journalism, I was more than shocked. I knew there was an up-tick in Mac usage but I certainly never imagined something like this. Even if it was staged or if having a Mac is a prerequisite, it is still an amazing sight.
Mac filled Missouri School of Journalism classroom [Large Version]
10.01.07 — Culture, Technology
On today’s semi-mandatory day off in America, Labor Day, I thought it would be nice to take a look at that nice New York Times graph comparing the number of mandatory days off in many of the top industrialized countries.
No surprise here, us Americans seem to think even a little mandatory paid time off is too much. Yes, that’s right even today–the day to honor us hard working Americans is not truly mandatory. So stuff another hot dog down your throat and flip on the TV cause there’s nothing to worry about.
09.03.07 — Culture, Politics
