I stumbled upon a very nice essay by Danah Boyd which compares and contrasts MySpace and Friendster and in the process describes the DNA of a social networking site and its users. I have read just about every commentary on social networking, Friendster, Facebook, Tribe, MySpace,… over the past couple of weeks for some research that Andrew and I have been doing. I will go out on a limb and say that if you read one commentary/analysis, read this one. Kudos Danah!

Some quotes:

People were hanging out on Friendster before they hung out on MySpace. But hanging out on Friendster is like hanging out in a super clean police state where you can’t chew gum let alone goof around and you’re told exactly how to speak to others. Hanging out on MySpace is more like hanging out in a graffiti park with fellow goofballs while your favorite band is playing. That said, there are plenty of folks who don’t want to be hanging out in a graffiti park and they are not sticking around on MySpace as a result.

This is the difference between tasks that people are required to do and social life. Social life isn’t about the easy way to do something - it’s about making meaning out of practice, about finding your own way.

the vast majority of Friendster users simply went back to email and IM, web surfing and the occasional blogging. Friendster didn’t meet their needs and the core practices of identity production and social sharing that MySpace offered were not significant enough for this group.

Oh and btw, if you think that you don’t need to care about MySpace, think again. A statistic from a few months back showed that MySpace had over 27 billion pageviews per month. All of Yahoo!’s properties combined is 32 billion. Google is around 10 billion. MySpace also has over 10% of the ad inventory on the Web. Un-freakin-believable.