Wired into Sacred Cow bashing*

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The new edition of Wired provides a much needed reality check on Web 2.0’s sacred cows.

For instance:

Wired’s annual “How To Wiki” carries some interesting articles. Some very good stuff. The online magazine also bashes some of the legends and myths surrounding social networking’s royal sacred cows. Let’s take Second Life as an example.

According to Wired;

“Second Life partisans claim meteoric growth, with the number of “residents,” or avatars created, surpassing 7 million in June.”

Wired’s sacred cow bash reveals that while the numbers at face value look impressive, the reality is that most people who create an avatar at Second Life, create more than one avatar for themselves. So in effect then, the numbers that have been attributed to Second Life’s stunning growth might probably be highly inflated. Oops!

Wired say that “according to Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, the number of avatars created by distinct individuals was closer to 4 million. Of those, only about 1 million had logged on in the previous 30 days (the standard measure of Internet traffic), and barely a third of that total had bothered to drop by in the previous week. Most of those who did were from Europe or Asia, leaving a little more than 100,000 Americans per week to be targeted by US marketers.

Next up for a sacred cow bashing is none other than Web 2.0’s other favoured Supreme Court embattled social network Facebook

FB’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has been cited in an action by fellow Harvard colleagues for fraud, copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets and is due at court today to face these allegations. Court action aside, Facebook is suffering from longterm user dissatisfaction brought on by the quick and large demographic shift within the previous 90 days.

The original early adopters of Facebook were college students in 2004 when Facebook was launched. These students are now qualified and have joined mainstream tax-paying America, USA and are concerned at the availability of their personal information to the sudden shift of FB’s original campus networking application toward what is rapidly becoming a business networking site. So many of these matured early adopters are now wasting their time having to tweak down the personal profile details visible to other FBers.

And if the trend toward morphing into a business network continues, the easy availablility of FBers personal details in this captive market becomes a valid concern.

“Facebook has moved way too far away from what it started as to appeal much to me anymore,” says Lindsay McCarthy, a recent University of Chicago graduate.”

Facebook started life on campuses as a network to broadcast the next party and to allow the students to stay in touch. The rapid rate of change at FB has seen LinkedIn lose its networking lustre to FB.

“Now that everyone and their mother — literally — have a profile, every ‘friend’ request I get makes me cringe.”

LinkedIn was favoured as the professionals recruiting network site. But the fickle nature of Web 2.0 may see LinkedIn returning to favour if the court case ruling goes against Mark Zuckerberg.

Wired into Sacred Cow bashing*

* As in, ‘wired into a network’