Danah Boyd at AOL Mountain View

Danah Boyd just wrapped up a great talk about online social spaces here at AOL Mountain View (the podcast is up already).  She delivered information via firehose. Some random notes...

There were several reasons why Friendster faded, and some lessons.

• Conflict between the user community and the space creators (they wanted a dating site, the users wanted to do a lot of other things).  Lesson: Listen to the community; be flexible; adjust the business plan when needed.
• Servers buckled under load when it got too popular.  Lesson: The technology has to work or people will lose patience and go to the competition.
  
• When Friendster started to try to go mainstream beyond the early adopter clusters, new users couldn't find any friends on the site so it wasn't useful to them.  Lesson:  Network effects work in reverse too.  Start with small clusters and grow organically.
  

MySpace did a big thing right: When people started 'hacking' HTML in their own spaces, the creators let it happen, then made it easier by adding the features that people actually wanted to use, like sound files (for indie bands) and videos from YouTube. This means the community is designing the service as much as the creators are; not just putting content, but guiding much of the design direction, along with highly visible and passionate designers engaged with the community.  Danah calls this Embedded Community Design. 

Best quote: "[Teens are] immune to bouncy visual overload." They've been immunized to this by mass media. (What does this mean for advertising as a business model?)

Last week, teens used MySpace to organize mass school walkouts to protest HR 4437. That's impressive regardless of your political views.

Tags: Danah Boyd, social software, online social networks