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October 26, 2005

MySpace vs. My Space

Jay raised a fantastic question Saturday that I haven't been able to get out of my head since:

Do the benefits of MySpace outweigh the benefits of My Space?

Rendered unclever: Which is better? To publish and participate in a closed social networking environment or to publish a blog/videoblog/podcast on your own server with your own blog installation?

Jay comes down on the side of My Space. He wants to see everyone self-publish with their own straight-up blog and their own server space. If personal media is partially about self-expression, then it is, in a way, also about self-determination. Content creation within MySpace comes with a whole slew of content restrictions and user agreements that many content creators may come up against one day. Plus there's that little issue of content ownership. As Eli pointed out to me the other day, News Corp owns any content produced on MySpace. In this sense, content creation within MySpace might be likened to slaves on a ship talking about who got the flyest chain.

But there are a ton of reasons to not dismiss MySpace as a platform for participatory media, primary among them are the social rewards that are crucial to introducing newbies to the world of blog authoring. (Even the videobloggers have their own "MySpace". It's called the Yahoo Videoblogging Group.)

Years of participatory media classes by Liz and Tricia have taught me that without strong, constructive and immediate feedback from one's peers, most students will stop blogging as soon as the class ends. There is no consistent reward down on the low end of the long tail, so unless you're able to connect a student's content creation with their existing social networks, that student's Blogger account will most likely go inactive soon after (and sometimes well before) the class ends. Meanwhile, these same students will continue to participate (and create content!) online within social networking services like MySpace.

So if a social networking service's user base includes a significant portion of a student's immediate social network, shouldn't that be our target space for introducing them to participatory media? If we teach them how to blog/videoblog/podcast within their existing social network, aren't we empowering them within their existing context?

In a content creation economy without financial rewards, peer feedback will drive users to create more sophisticated content. Within social networking spaces, comments -- along with more valuable "friends" links -- are the currency of that economy.

If we teach someone how to post a videoblog entry on their MySpace home page, they have a greater chance of receiving feedback from their friends (and a few strangers) than they would posting to a Blogger account. As they receive more comments ("That's so COOL!"), it may spur them to post more content. As they post more content, they hone their content creation skills, and the sophistication of their posts increases.

This is the thinking behind the latest changes to the videoblogging curricula I'm involved in implementing. It's only been a few weeks, so check back in a few months and I'll tell you how it goes. In the meantime, one thing I know for certain is that I shouldn't be teaching participatory content creation without a strong, relevant social framework to place people in. My hope is that other folks will do the same.

Posted by yatta at October 26, 2005 12:38 PM

Comments

I think people will say they prefer open over closed, but when it comes down to it a good-enough closed system will win. At least in the short game.

A few examples:
Closed IM vs. Jabber
VOIP connected to the phone system vs. a SIP connection on every handset
Friendster vs. FOAF
DRM vs. well, everything, these days
OS X vs. Linux

It's not that people are clamoring to be locked into a proprietary system. The closed solution is generally the pragmatic one, because there's enough money behind it to make it good enough.

I think in the long term that the open systems win out when they hit their tipping point and subsume the closed systems. When universities and companies are emailing each other, then people start asking Prodigy why they can't email other people for free too.

Posted by: George Hotelling at October 26, 2005 4:14 PM

Yatta,

Thanks for getting this down. I think George sums it up well:
"I think in the long term that the open systems win out when they hit their tipping point and subsume the closed systems. When universities and companies are emailing each other, then people start asking Prodigy why they can't email other people for free too."

I beleive it will happen when distributed systems or specific capabiliites (RSS feeds with BitTorrent to STBs for example) aren't available on the tight service providers but are to those who run their own services.

Posted by: Shawn Van Every at October 26, 2005 10:56 PM

This was a very interesting question at the conference, and I'm glad to see your followup. Do I really have to wait a few months to find out more?

I think that there will be a wide variety of MySpaces out there, each with a different community and secondarily a different level of open-ness. Even OurMedia is a form of "MySpace".


In theory, there's no reason why someone couldn't have the best of both worlds (spaces)...

(p.s. I had some problems trying to use my TypeKey identity, it asked for my e-mail but then gave an error.)

Posted by: Sean Gilligan at November 1, 2005 2:33 AM

p.p.s. Preview doesn't show how the line breaks are really going to work...

Posted by: Sean Gilligan at November 1, 2005 2:34 AM