What your website says about you

It was like a scene from A Clockwork Orange : armed with metal bars, baseball bats and bicycle chains, pupils from three schools in Devon converged for a mass brawl. But this particular fight - thankfully averted by police - had been arranged online, largely on the social networking site Bebo.com.

The volume of people now using networking sites means that illicit behaviour is bound to occur online, and the forces that police the web have to guard not only against paedophiles and terrorists but everyday users, too. If a child is being bullied at school, their peers will frequently bombard their email account or homepage with abuse.

But the fact that Bebo was the forum for the pupils arranging the school fight highlights the way in which internet sites are becoming split along the lines of class and age. Bebo organises its users by the school they attend and is all the rage among pupils (although given that the site had 9.3 million British users last month aged 15 or over, the age range is clearly not just limited to kids).

A US academic, Danah Boyd, this week described how white, wealthy and university-bound high-school students tend to do their networking on Facebook.com, while those from poorer, non-university backgrounds use Myspace.com.

Is this the shape of a nascent class system - the wealthy on Facebook, average Joes on Myspace, children on Bebo?

Figures for the UK are hard to come by, but Quantcast.com, which breaks down demographic data for millions of sites, found that US visitors to Facebook were indeed wealthier and from better-educated families, while the families of Myspace and Bebo users were poorer and less well-educated.

The sites' most famous moments reflect these age and class boundaries. Bebo, popular among children, was used by Alan Shearer's daughters to post a video of him singing along to U2. Myspace, big with teens, was the launchpad for singers such as Lily Allen.

Facebook, where the students and graduates hang out, had some fascinating debates on the Labour deputy leadership contest. As Boyd pointed out, the US military recently banned soldiers in Iraq from using Myspace, to conserve bandwidth, but Facebook, favoured by officers, was left alone.

One factor that determines the audience a particular site attracts is its history. Facebook was started at Harvard, spread around the Ivy League and other universities, and only then opened up. Design is also a factor: our own MyTelegraph site was built to link to our news stories and blogs, and attracts a readership to match - intelligent, adult and engaged.

Myspace and Bebo, meanwhile, let users design their own homepages, putting a premium on youthful self-expression. Joanna Shields, president of Bebo, says these "skins" are perhaps the site's most popular feature.

User culture also plays a part: Facebook's members tend to use their full names, but only allow their friends to read their profiles. On Myspace, first names or pseudonyms are the norm - but so is leaving your page open for anyone to read.

Most important, however, is getting there first. These sites live or die by the network effect - more users means a greater pool of prospective friends, which makes the sites more attractive. Start losing people to another site and the wound can be hard to staunch.

Thus Bebo, which launched after Myspace and Facebook in America, is a distant third there, but rivals Myspace in popularity in the UK and is top of the heap in Ireland.

But much of the process is out of the sites' hands, as users discover niches and uses not originally envisaged - Myspace has gathered a host of unsigned bands; Orkut, a social-networking site owned by Google, has bombed in most places but is huge in Brazil; an older site, Friendster.com, is massive in the Philippines.

Shields admits that targeting specific features at particular demographics is nigh-on impossible. "It's much less scientific than that," she says. "We just try to make the site a platform for self-expression, something that is interesting for users, that they will want to stick around on."

Kathryn Corrick, a digital media consultant, agrees. "Facebook works because people recommend it to each other," she says. "That's because they've made it very 'viral', by creating so many different ways you can engage with your friends.

Some people just want to say 'Hey, I'm here' - which they do using the function called Poke. Some want to send private messages, so use the mail system, while others want to talk in a very open way, so write on Walls. It's very good design."

It is possible that eventually social networking will be dominated by a few giant sites, to which virtually every internet user will be signed up - but there are some important sticking points. For starters, not everybody wants to talk to everybody else.

Even within a family, it is hard to imagine everyone signing up to the same site - teenagers will not want their parents to see what they got up to the night before; adults might dislike the lack of grammar and chaotic design on their children's pages.

Already, niche networks that cater to special interests are emerging around the giants. MyTelegraph is one, as is Beautiful People (us.beautifulpeople.net), a terrifyingly narcissistic site whose members only let in those they judge attractive. One of the latest start-ups, Ning.com, allows you to build your own social networks around any interest you can envisage.

Also, as Shields points out, many users will have more than one account, hopping from Myspace to Facebook to Bebo depending on their mood. This overlap can only be enhanced by Facebook's recent decision to allow other developers to hook into its network, so that you can now share your Flickr photos on the site or recommend music through the iLike application.

Whatever their technical wizardry, sites will rise and fall on the uses people invent for them and how open they are to innovation. "One of the mistakes many social-networking companies have made is to look at the technology community as where you start things off," says Corrick.
Source :http://www.telegraph.co.uk/