[Full disclosure: I work for Tucows as their tech evangelist!]
I’m going to present another set of results from The Duke of URL, an application I wrote to showcase the advanced domain name lookup features of the Tucows API. Given a word or phrase, the Duke makes a single API call yielding these results:
The availabilty of .com, .net and .org domain names for the word or phrase
Up to 15 Premium Domain Names — that is .com, .net and .org names based on the word or phrase that are available on the domain name aftermarket
Up to 100 suggestions for .com, .net and .org names based on the word or phrase that are available
Let’s take a look at some results from the Duke based on one of my favourite beverages: coffee.
In testing The Duke of URL, my application that displays available domain names, domain name suggestions and available domain aftermarket names based on a word or phrase you enter (see this entry for details), I tried a number of interesting words. This week, I’ll present the results of these tests.
Today’s word is poop, and here are the Premium Domain Names that are based on it and for sale:
I took notes and photos during her presentation and present them below…
danah boyd making her “MyFriends, MySpace” presentation at the Berkman Center at Harvard, Tuesday, June 19th, 2007.
To Begin, Some Quotes from Teenagers…
“If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist” — Skyler Sierra
“My mom doesn’t let me out of the house…” — desperate desire to be social, even in the face of increasing strictness
Who is danah boyd and What Does She Do?
What danah does: ethonography, which means “writing culture”
Her field of study: youth in America
In her studies, she’s been moving between online and offline worlds
Since 2004, she’s been “hanging out in and being present among youth culture”, doing things like:
Fast food places and malls
Riding buses when school’s out
Interviewing not only youth, but parents, pastors, teachers, etc.
Looking over something int he area of 10,000 MySpace profiles
Networked Publics
55% of online American teens 12 - 17 claim to have a profile on some social software system.
Note that these are teens who will admit this sort of thing in front of their parents; the actual number is porbably higher
A social software system can be called a networked public
What is a networked public?
A space or collection of people that exist within and through tools that network people
Sometimes it’s a civic space, sometimes it’s not
Usenet was an early form of networked public
As time passed, people migrated to mailing lists, which are also a networked public
Then, with the web explosion, people moved to forums, which are also networked publics
And now, in the Web 2.0 age, we’ve got social software, which are also networked publics
Early networked publics — newsgroups, mailing lists and forums — were organized by topic
Web 2.0 changes rules of organization — now they’re arranged by friends and communities
Friendster
One of the earliest social software sites
Not mainstream — its populace fell could be divided into three categories:
Self-defined geeks. It was popular among geeks in San Francisco, who in 2003 — the afternath of the dot-com bubble bursting — had lots of spare time.
“Freaks” (as in counter-culture). A large number of the freaks were Burning Man regulars who used Friendster communicate with fellow “Burners”.
Queers (mostly gay men in New York). Gay men in New York City were using Friendster to arrange “hook-ups”
In June 2003, Friendster hit the mainstream news, with 300,000 users, most of whom were active
A distinction arose between real friends and Frienster friends — “She’s not my friend, she’s my Friendster”
Friendster was originally designed to be a place to find and arrnaged dates
As such, its creators tried to enforce rules that fit its intended purpose:
No fake images: you were supposed to use only a real photo of yourself in a profile, not an icon or avatar a la LiveJournal
Profiles were formal
No “Fakesters” — that is, no fake personas or pseudonyms. Each Friendster profile had to correspond to a real person
Trying to make people follow these rules was like playing “Whack-a-mole”:
Rather than treating it like a dating site, as its creators intended, people treated it as a fun online space and a place to experiment with self-expression
People created fake profiles, a.k.a. “Fakesters” for all sorts of reasons
Some people created fake profiles — usually with a very attractive photo — simply to build a collection of friends
Friendster didn’t have groups like Facebook’s, so some people created Fakesters for this purpose. Harvard had a fakester so that Harvard people could find each other.
While these transgressions of the rules served Friendster’s users well, they did not align with the creators’ wishes
The creators responded not by listening to their users base, but by killing off the goofy things, which in turn killed off some of Friendster’s useful populations
MySpace
Right from the very beginning, MySpace was meant to be a complete rip-off of Friendster
MySpace’s creators reached out to people kicked off from Friendster for various transgressions
One crowd the MySpace creators actively courted from the beginning were independent rock musicians:
Many indie rockers were kicked off Friendster for using Fakesters to network with their fans
They listened to their indie rock band users and added features they requested
L.A. music promoters started using MySpace as a means of tracking and communicating with music and DJ event fans
Bands started using MySpace to convince clubs to book them — “Check out our MySpace page! See all the fans we have!”
The first group of music fans to make use of MySpace were the 21+ crowd
The younger people began to join
Kids want to read about youth slightly older than them — consider that the readers of Seventeen magazine are on average 13 years old
MySpace began extending it “downward reach”, age wise: they dropped the minimum age to join from 16 to 14. 14 is as low as they can go without requiring parental consent or getting into dangerous legal territory
The first kids to join MySpace were the “arts scene” kids in high school
They liked being able to collect friends
A teen found that the MySpace people weren’t too tech savvy, and that they didn’t filter a lot of their input. He found that he could include HTML tags in all sort of MySpace input and started using them
Rather than try to stop this, the MySpace people allowed it and observed how people took advantage of the oversight
This led to what danah called “Copy/paste literacy” — people knew enough to figure out what HTML and JavaScript code to copy from other people’s MySpace sites, but not enough to know how it worked
One side effect of this was the rise of phishing on MySpace
danah boyd’s presentation at the Berkman Center, June 19th, 2007.
Properties of Social Networking Sites
Most social networking sites provide these three things:
A Profile, where you can provide a picture and other information about yourself
A mechanism that allows you to declare other members as “Friends”. Note that “Friends” in the system is a different concept from real-life friends:
Friends in the system aren’t all people whom you trust or are close to. Sometimes, you declare people as friends when:
You want to look cool (especially if these people are popular)
You want to get to know them
They’re a band you like
“Why not?”
It seems impolite to say “no”
Ability to write public comments. This got started in Friendster as “testimonials” and lives on in MySpace as comments and Facebook as “The Wall”.
In Friendster, there were two highly followed Fakesters, “Table Salt” and “Pepper”, who would write glowing, gushing testimonials of each other
Strangely enough, people don’t seem to mind communicating to each other in public. In Facebook, over 66% of the messaging is done by writing on people’s walls, as opposed to using private messages
Unlike “real-world” publics like the park or the mall, networked publics have these qailities:
Persistence: What you “say” in a networked public can last at least as long as the service does
Searchability: And in a matter of seconds, too.
Replicability: What you “say” in a networked public can easily be copied
Invisible audience: You don’t know how many “witnesses” are around to “hear” what you “say” — nobody? A few people? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? Even more?
Given these properties, young people have found ways to make sense of it all
Online spaces, like real life spaces, have rules…
There are social norms and roles for online spaces and contexts for gatherings
In many online spaces, the topic of the forum sets the tones and rules
The “like-minds effect” of the early internet disappeared after the boom
You might have many audiences, for which a different “voice” is best. Which voice do you use?
Celebrities and their effects on these new publics:
This generation is growing up with celebrity-style publics
They’re getting their cues from Paris Hilton, and the lesson is that it’s better to be public and be seen than private and invisible
Kids are turning to networked publics to get access to publics that would otherwise be denied to them
The Creation of the Teenager and the Rise of Age Segregation
During the Great Depression, moral reformers teamed up with the government to instill the high school regime
This led to the rise of age segregation
They created sports and other extra-curricular activites to keep people off the street and away from labour organizers
Having adolescents occupied with high school was protection for the labour force, so they wouldn’t be displaced by these younger, more able-bodied people
High school’s system of age segregation led to the rise of bullying, which was a largely unknown phenomenon before 1950
The term “teenager” was created in 1941 by marketers
Another effect of age segregation: adults don’t understand young people
Fear of things like the Catholic church scandals is reinforcing age segregation
Another effect: teenagers are kept out of public life
Teen mobility is becoming increasingly limited:
Urban and suburban design is such that cars are necessary, limiting access to many places
Even in cities with good public transit systems, many kids aren’t let out of sight. In the UK, people are practically terrified to let the kids out of the house
These days, kid time is high structured. Think of the rise of things like “play dates”, the increase is extra-curricular activities and so on — all upper-middle class phenomena
Messaging in Public
Why are people on social networking sites like Facebook communicating by writing comments on the publicly-viewable wall as opposed to sending private messages?
One reason: It makes for better “cred” for social interactions
It provides control of the situation:
Many kids break up not in person, but in mediated fashion: through phone, IM or MySpace
Breaking up this way allows for control of the conversation
It provides witnesses. People “hear” what you said, rather than “what she said you said”
Database rules as a reflection of real life: in MySpace, deleting a friend deletes their comments. It effectively “wipes them out”, at least in your world
Friend deletion is rare, which makes deletion a very strong statement
danah boyd and Berkman Center fellow Ethan Zuckerman.
“The Most Dramatic Part of MySpace
MySpace’s “Top 8″ feature — where you can rank friends as your “top 8″ — is the most dramatic part of MySpace
Many fights ensue as a result of people being added to or removed from a friend’s Top 8
To quote one teenager, MySpace’s Top 8 is “the new dangling carrot for gaining superficial acceptance”
Dodging audiences
Which audiences do kids want to dodge? It’s people with direct power over them, such as their parents
“Chi-mos” or child molesters are not as big a problem as spammers and scammers
How do you evade people in a networked public?
You can build walls — things that keep unwanted audiences out — through lies
You can make demands to the people who run the sites, asking for features that allow you to evade people
You can “play ostrich”, which is the number one way adults deal with panic of publics
The assumption that what you plut online is public only to people like you is based on an assumption we make based on physical space
Public Life is Changing
We don’t have the techniques to educate people about how to interact within networked publics
The new generation is one that wants to socialize, but is constrained by time and structure
Email is dead to young people. It’s used as a means of communicating with people who have power over them
In social software, you click on a person’s pic and you know it’s them
Social software message systems have less spam
The rates are getting better — better than 10 cents per SMS
Outside the US, social network sites are profile-centric as opposed to message-centric
Meanwhile, it’s rude to SMS cause we have to pay to get the message.
Question-and-Answer/Discussion Session
These network publics are for-profit, which means that business decisions shape them. Are the users cognizant of that? Does it affect their decisions?
My activist self wantsd to believe that the users are aware of that, but sadly, that’s not the case
To them, seeing ads means that the service is free
Kids are so used to being blasted with ads that they don’t notice them
There is a sharp divide between the MySpace and Facebook cultures: Facebook is working class and subculture, which Facebook is upper-middle-class and college-bound
This divide is playing out at all sorts of levels
Note that the U.S. military is banning the use of MySpace, but not Facebook. They’re banning what the soldiers are using, not what the officers are using.
In Facebook culture, it’s better to be less commercial and more tasteful. Ads in Facebook are more like Google ads
In MySpace culture, it’s all about bling, so loud ads are acceptable and commercialization is cool
“They don’t know a world that’s not commercial. They don’t know a public life that’s not commercial”
But there’s no way to support a system like MySpace without commercials
Advertisers and social netowrking site creators are iterating based on youth desires — it’s not that kids don’t want ads, they don’t want ads that aren’t relevant to them.
What do you think the next step for social networking sites will be?
That kind of stuff is always hard to predict
I don’t think that that immersion — a la Second Life or World of Warcraft — will be the next big thing
Rather, I think that mobile — access via phones or phone-like devices — will be the next big thing
There are two possible mobile futures:
Genuine wireless, where there’s no “carrier barrier”
Something like Blyk, where you get a free mobile phone in exchange for viewing ads
Growth will affect what becomes the next big thing. If you’re dealing with people on Wall Street, you need to demonstrate that your social networking site will grow.
But growth means dealing with multiple audiences, which leads to fragmentation
Consider Facebook: it’s gaining an older audience at the cost of its younger audience
Successful social software needs cluster effects
If only 80% of your friends can participate, you won’t
An interesting aside: many MySpace users have their profiles managed by other people — friends, girlfriends and so on. People know each other’s login credentials
On successful social software sites, everyone participates at different levels
Can social networking sites be used to counteract some of the effects of age segregation, the way things like Hakim Bey’s“Temporary Autonomous Zones” or World of Warcraft, where people of different ages and other classifications seem to?
It’s tricky
The vast majority of teens are talking to ony to people within their groups
They’re told that all adult strangers are bad
“My mom says it’s okay to talk to you”
Recounted a story about a lost boy scout troop that took longer to find because they were hiding from search parties, all of whom were adult strangers. They were rescued only when the search parties clued into this and brought children with them
The online world is probably not the place to introduce adult strangers
There’s been a pervasive sense of “Stranger Danger” since 2000
It’s a problem for reasearchers trying to talk to kids
Adults are doing a bad job of navigating the future — you’ll have to navigate the future yourself
Have you seen any differences in the ways boys and girls use social networking sites?
“Most of it’s not surprising”
Many boys’ profiles are created by their girlfriends
There seems to be equal numbers of boys and girls
When it comes to ad-hoc socialization, it seems to be stronger on the girls’ side. Data from Pew Research confirms that they use to maintain contacts
Boys are more likely to talk to strangers — “especially hot ones” and more likely to collect strangers in their friends lists
Girls more active in terms of deep participation
Girls know the copy/paste stuff, boys know HTML and proxies
The predator panic did damage to MySpace
Kids are switching to Facebook because “it’s where my friends are and it’s where mom lets me go”
There was some discussion about the “NYU 2011″ Facebook group, a group of kids who are graduating from high school this summer and will be attending New York University as the class fo 2011 in the fall. In essence, they’ll be “meeting” each other ahead of time, something that wasn’t possible when most of us were in college.
This sort of “pre-meeting” online might take away from the excitement
Might foster self-selecting groups — consider homophily
It’s not clear what cause-and-effects of homophily are
More things in common: more likely that you’ll stick
Consider the side effect of “Stranger Danger”
Colleges are social experiments
What are the reasons provided by the minority of kids who don’t participate in these sites?
Parents don’t allow it
Church doesn’t allow it — although some are providing alternatives like Jerry Falwell’s Battle Cry
Some claim that they’re “too cool” to participate
Of the people who aren’t already online, 75% don’t want to be
Online access transcends race and class, although the kids in inner cities know how to access the proxies
Moms with kids use the net to skip past time constraints. Do teen parents use the net similarly?
Typically, teens with kids are living at home and get their advice from their parents
Social networking sites are not being used by teen parents as a way of communicating with other teen parents
Social networking sites are now a part of youth culture. What do you think we should do?
Currently, there are 57 pieces of legislation to ban these sites
We need to educate people about negotiating these publics
Rather than give edicts to young people, make them think about these publics. One way: Morality plays that start with the question “How would you feel if…?” — Ask questions, make ‘em work on hypotheticals!
We make so much fuss about online sexual predators, and then jail them, only to release them a very short time later. Don’t make new laws, enforce the existing ones!
Street outreach programs have proven their worth in the real world — perhaps it’s time for an online equivalent
We need to figure out what to do about “Stranger Danger”
Full Discloure Time: Before I begin, let me make it very clear: I work for Tucows. I hold the position of Technical Evangelist, and my job is to extol the virtues of Tucows’ services to technical audiences as well as curious laypeople.
The Domain Name Aftermarket
There used to be a time when a domain could fall under one of two categories:
It was available, which meant that you could buy it
It was taken, which meant that it was in use
That’s changed. These days, “taken” doesn’t mean necessarily mean that you can’t acquire it. Many taken domain names live in domain name portfolios, which are pools of domain names that have been purchased for later resale. The set of all such portfolios out there is collectively referred to as the domain name aftermarket.
Image from the Tucows Premium Domains Screencast. Click to watch the screencast.
Oftentimes, the “unavailable” domain name that you want is actually for sale, but most domain name vendors don’t make that clear — they simply say that the domain name is taken. Even if you’re aware of the aftermarket, you have to search several portfolios to see if the domain name that you want is there.
Tucows’ Premium Domain Names service makes life easier for customers of Tucows’ domain name partners. We connect our partners with a number of domain name portfolios so that they can offer their customers domain names from a number of portfolios, opening a universe of names that they otherwise wouldn’t know were for sale. Best of all, purchasing one of these premium domain names hides the complexities of transferring the domain name — the transfer takes less than 60 seconds, and to the customer, it’s as quick as buying an available domain name!
Image from the Tucows Premium Domains Screencast. Click to watch the screencast.
Want to find out more? Let me point to you a couple of places with the details:
There’s an entertaining screencast with me chatting with Tucows Domain product manager Adam Eisner about Tucows Premium Domains.
I’ve written version 2.0 of The Duke of URL, a cute little demo app that shows the Tucows API’s features for checking domain name availability, finding premium domain names and making domain name suggestions.
Here’s a dialog box from Aegisub, an application for subtitling video:
Screen capture courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
For the benefit of RSS readers and search engines, here’s the text of the dialog box:
You have chosen to use the “Comic Sans” font. As a programmer and a typesetter, I must urge you to reconsider. Comic Sans is the most abused font in the history of computing, so please avoid using it unless it’s REALLY suitable. Thanks.
I’m really glad that such a dialog box exists!
If you’d like to join the cause to rid the world of that horrible font, I suggest that you visit the Ban Comic Sans site.
Here are some of the stats presented in the video, courtesy of the blog Where is Puck:
25% of the population in China with highest IQ is greater than the total population in North America
The top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 did not exist in 2004
The U.S. is 20th in the world in broadband Internet penetration (just behind Luxemburg)
Nintendo invested $140 million research and development in 2002 alone. The US Government spent less than half as much research and innovation in education
1 out of every 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met online
There are 106 million registered users of MySpace. If MySpace were a country it would be number 11th largest in the world (between Japan and Mexico)
It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year. That’s estimated to be more than in the last 5,000 years
I find the societal predictions in the presentation a little more credible than the ones about artificial intelligence and single computers that will be able to outpace the entrie human race by 2050. I remember the promise of fifth generation computing in the 80’s — that artificial intelligence was just a decade away and that we’d all be communicating with our computers in natural language.
Minor quibbles aside, I found the presentation fascinating.
[A tip of the hat to my father-in-law, who first saw the presentation at a conference he recently attended!]
I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner, but someone — SarcasticGamer.com, the folks behind the How to Kill Your Brand video — has finally created a parody of Microsoft’s “you should be in awe, or at least think we still have some ‘game’ left” ads for Surface, their vision of “big-ass table” computing:
Although I credit David Isenberg with coming up with the concept of the Stupid Network and why it’s a good thing, it may take a guy like Mr. T. to popularize the notion that a system’s “smarts” don’t belong in its network. By way of Andy Baio’s site, Waxy.org (he found it at Flipzagging), here’s a video of Mr. T. extolling the virtues of Hitachi’s storage virtualization:
