“Teenager, American or European, kind of person who likes to text a lot, probably quite immature, large group of friends, not much into going out getting sloshed, like wot I did when I woz a kid, innit?”

Well, remove yourself from this yob, and look at the actual figures.

North America and Europe contribute 65.8% of all Facebook users, and only around 10% of their users are teenagers. That means less than 7% of the actual Facebook user base is the cliché most of us – especially those of us in the industry – think of as their user base.

The majority are quite different. And I think once you understand the actual group using Facebook, you start to understand its popularity in some groups (and the derision it receives in others).

Obviously (given its history), people above graduation age are the norm. Most of us (myself included), use it as a platform to keep distant touch with people we ordinarily would not speak to year-to-year, never mind day-to-day or week-to-week. We are a generation of nomads, spreading out across the globe after school and University, keeping in touch with people via the light touch of the status update. Twitter is for people who are perhaps a little more frantic (and for me at least, it’s a great way to keep in touch with my peer group, people who I might not have met, but whose work I’m interested in).

It’s not, however, a tool for teenagers. Not really. They have a social group they see almost every day – they don’t want or need Facebook. Likewise, the people who don’t like Facebook are typically people who see their social groups regularly.

For those of us who are geeks, well our groups tend to be a little more dispersed. I can name friends and family in a dozen cities around the World I wouldn’t keep up with as much if FB wasn’t there. Those people who don’t have such far-flung friends, teenagers included, simply have no use for it: they can, you know, actually talk to them.

For some reason, until seeing that graph, that thought had never occurred to me.

Last night however, it was my turn to learn. One of them had asked me last week about the phrase “Jumping the Shark” and where it had come from. Last night she told me the very next day after I’d explained it to her, she watched an episode of Scooby Doo (OK, maybe they’re not that cultured) where Scooby jumps a shark and that it had made more sense to her knowing what it was a reference to – it is one of the classic insider jokes within TV comedy. I then had to re-explain it all to the other people assembled. The conversation that followed was… interesting:

It went on in a similar vein for a few more minutes. More examples of the futility of the network, the silliness of the apps. Admittedly, none of them had left Facebook yet, but that might be that it’s rather hard to leave, as GeekUp and Co-working day regular Alan Burlison found out

These are people the social networks need. In their early 20s. University students. Bright, intelligent, aspirational. I have no doubt that within a decade most of them will be in the upper 25% of earners in the UK. Malcolm Gladwell would call them “sneezers” or something – they spread their likes and dislikes around their friends quickly. They set trends.

And in the last couple of months they have come to hate Facebook and MySpace.

Specifically, they hate that these networks have been opened up to people engaging in what is effectively a developed and sophisticated form of spam. They hate that they are being hassled via the social graph into doing “fun” things that are actually about as fun as receiving a hoax virus e-mail. They understand that their time and attention is important and its being wasted by sites that don’t respect that.

I have ideas for applications that will actually add value to the social graph and be of use to people in this group, but by the time I get to roll them out it could be too late – the people that make the platform interesting to me as a recruitment base for customers may have moved onto something else.

Facebook are adding features to improve the user experience as they learn how developers are gaming the system. They might win the battle in time, but ultimately they might have to give more control to users to block invites from apps that are not even remotely in their realm of interest.

This isn’t over yet. 2008 could easily be the year the social networks died.

You have a trademark over a game, that quite frankly went out of fashion in the 1980s. Nobody wants to play it any more because it’s seen as dull, boring and just a little bit “fuddy”.

Then, one day, you notice sales are starting to rise. People are buying the game again. You can’t understand why, so you commission another report (hey, that’s your job) to find out where this new interest is coming from. A few months later, you have an answer – somebody has created an electronic copy of your game and made it available as an application in a social networking site. People are so crazy for it as a result, your brand is now gaining value and you’re going to have to think about how to cater for this new generation of players.

What do you do?

Well, if you’re Mattel or Hasbro and your games is Scrabble and the online app is Scrabulous on Facebook, you naturally send out cease & desist letters and hack off your new fan base.

The idiocy of this decision is monumental. Yes, you need to protect your trademark. Yes, you need to show that you’ve acted to protect it otherwise you can end up losing it anyway. Do they really think this is the way forward though?

I have to admit I’m a tad biased here. Here’s my Scrabulous stats screen:

As you can see, I’m one of those people who plays daily, and plays a lot. I’d hate to see it go. But that’s not why I’m writing about it here.

There is something new about the economy that is spreading around us. In the past ideas, trademarks, patents all were treated as if they had some inherent power that should not be discussed. People say they won’t discuss things because they need to be secret, that they fear the legal consequences. People don’t give up ideas until they’re “protected”. People guard words they invented as if they alone are the secret sauce to great riches.

Here’s the thing: that’s all bullshit now.

You want people to talk about your product, your ideas. You want them to talk, talk, talk, talk all day long. You want people to stand up and shout from the rooftops about your products, your patents, your trademarks. You want them to share their ideas of how your products could be made better. When they start doing that, especially when other people are providing them the tools to do it, you should think very carefully about whether you want to tell them to shut up.

The level of targeting is just outright astonishing. It allows for ads not only to be targeted on demographics such as age range and city, but even on interests and relationship status.

For example, I now know there are approximately (all figures given are approximate to the nearest 20 or so), 120 people in Manchester interested in Programming.

Out of the 2,017,440 UK citizens who describe themselves on Facebook as ‘single’, 998,900 are male, 904,960 are female. The numbers don’t add up because some people don’t define a gender which makes the point that if you don’t fill info in, you can’t be targeted via that info.

There are 1,180 females in the UK who declare an interest in ‘Computers’. The figure for males is around 8,540.

580 UK men say they’re really into shoes, with 14,300 British women aspiring to be Imelda Marcos.

There are around 5,680 people working for BT in the UK on Facebook. In the US, there are around 40 people working for O’Reilly Media who mention it in their profile. I could target either with an advert – handy if you have a product or idea you want to pitch.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Advertisers don’t need to know who your friends are (the social graph), to target you this tightly. If a member of GeekUp wanted to put up a singles ad for all single women between the ages of 24 and 32 who are into computers resident in Manchester (approx. 100 of them), they now theoretically could. Lucky ladies.

The question is, is this really a bad thing? Doesn’t it mean we’re not all going to see advertising that really has no relevance to us? Or does this kind of marketing mean that we are the perfect willing victims for advertisers to go deep into our psyche? I knew this day was coming, but I thought it was still some way off.

I think you have to remember that a lot of people are still working Facebook out. We didn’t witness people learning the web for the first time, but with FB we kind of have to. I think it’ll go like this:

1. For a while people will entertain themselves with zombie stuff

2. Then they’ll start looking for more interesting uses of the social graph and a few apps (think sharing useful data with friends, dating, etc.) will start to get traction

3. There on out, app developers will stop cutting their teeth on toy apps and start innovating

It’s going to be painful to get there, but it will happen, and it won’t just be Facebook: it’ll be cross-site so you might be in FB whilst I’m in MySpace or whatever (thanks to the open API efforts of several players, that FB will have to sign up to eventually).

Think back to how bad the web was in the early days. Think how it matured and we started getting useful things out of it eventually.

We’re very early on in the arch of developing social networking applications, but it won’t take 1/10th the time it took for the web to mature.

I think many people who have seen the web develop since the mid-1990’s will understand this and ‘get it’. We’re able to see it from a bigger picture, the arch that the web has taken over the last decade.

Many people new to the web are seeing it (from our point of view) almost at a macro level: they can’t imagine a World before blogs, before wikis, before UGC. I’m not saying Hugh is one of these macro-viewers who doesn’t get the big picture – heck, he gets things most people hadn’t even begun to think about, and he certainly understands the web – but I think he’s wrong on this one.

There are a couple of issues here.

Firstly, Facebook isn’t actually stopping 3rd-party API developers from knowing who your friends are, and if your friends agree to add an application, the app provider can see their graph too. What isn’t agreed yet is whether this should be made more open, or whether there needs to be a standard way of describing this data. There are all sorts of reasons why I might not want my “social graph” to be made available in an easily-manageable format, not least because it raises privacy concerns.

There is also the fact that Facebook’s business model relies on not making this data available. The “expose your data, and they will come” argument relies on a simple metric of conversion.

Within a company like Amazon, exposing the product catalogue by API is a no-brainer. The more places their stock list is available, the more chances they have of getting somebody into the system, the more likely they are to convert them into a sale. The porous membrane an API gives an app developer in this instance means 3rd-prty developers do the hard work of getting stock shifted in countless innovative ways the original company wouldn’t have thought of.

Facebook however, is different. The ‘conversion’ in their instance is getting somebody to look at pages with adverts on it. What they need is for their users to actively recruit more users – invite them inside the walled garden – and then try and keep them there. They’ve out-sourced the “retaining” part of the equation to developers (playing games, taking quizzes, sharing links, glorified e-mail), but by allowing their most valuable asset to be easily exported they are reducing their customer’s incentive to stay within the walled garden.

As always, it comes down to whether you have a right to that data, and whether you have a right to move it. I’d argue you do, but I’m suggesting it’s going to be hard for Facebook to allow you to take it wherever you want.

[UPDATE]: I realised there is a way to do this without Facebook’s permission. I’ve written it up on the site.

You can have multiple profiles and link them together in Facebook if you want. To my knowledge, nobody I know does this – everything they do just piles into one profile. In fact, I’m not even sure people know you can do this. Being completely open with one profile would traditionally be considered a high-risk strategy when mixing business contacts and personal contacts.

We’ve all heard stories about the graduate applying for a job at a top firm and being the perfect picture of potential leadership until somebody finds their MySpace page, complete with pictures of drug use, snippets from their starring role in a ‘Girls Gone Wild’ video and profanity-filled exchanges with friends. We are told that “They” don’t like this – “we” should be wary.

I think paranoia is more to blame for these warnings than reality.

We are no longer living in a parody of the 1950s. I don’t think that society was ever really as rigid as the films and documentaries make it look – where everybody calls each other by their surname and a tipple too many after dinner left you a social outcast, but even if it was real we’re leaving that mode of thinking about each other and quickly moving into an era where authenticity matters.

As a potential employer, I would rather know a new manager has an “interesting past”. It would help me understand his/her character more than pretending they were conceived a perfect model of professionalism.

I don’t know if the rest of the World is going to see things the way I do, but I know that Facebook and social network apps like it are making more people face up to the reality of dealing with people as they are, not how we’d like them to be.

He makes a point about Facebook which I find interesting. With some customisation, it is possible to tailor what you see and what you don’t (yes, you can turn off the stuff you’re not interested in). As such, we’re able to tailor how we spend our time on Facebook to make it useful for us. That doesn’t mean we spend any more time on Facebook, it just makes that time more productive.

What if all applications were able to work like that? What if we took the “News Feed” concept of Facebook and dropped it into the front page of all our applications and then allowed the user to specify what they wanted to see more or less of, and allow them to tailor the productivity?

Apparently (and interestingly):

“The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.”

Or so says Danah Boyd in her essay “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace”. Please note the title of this post is a pun on a famous political rebuttal, not a comment on the intelligence of Danah Boyd or her thesis.

The idea there is a class divide online is an interesting thesis, but her argument as to why this is happening is a little… strange.

“Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.” What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as “glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens. Terms like “bling” come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” – they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.”

I think she’s almost right. The problem is, the kids don’t know how to verablise what they mean and she doesn’t know enough about Human Computer Interaction to name it.

I don’t think it’s aesthetics that makes the difference, but ergonomics. Yes, it’s possible to customise MySpace pages to an endless degree and make it look gaudy, but most people don’t or when they do tend to keep it low-key (a point that Boyd brings up, and further analyses in terms of social divides).

However it is the ergonomics of the software that marks the real difference between the two sites.

Facebook is a simple, structured application. The control of the interface and how it works is in most part in the hands of the developers. The users are not invited to ‘improve it’ outside of the Developer API. MySpace allows the audience to tinker to their heart’s content but doesn’t allow the structured ‘plugging in’ of 3rd-party applications preferring to keep everything home-grown.

I would argue that Facebook is more ‘left brain’ and MySpace more ‘right brain’ in their approaches. Facebook supports a sequential way of thinking, learning the interface step-by-step and ‘climbing up in knowledge’ as they go. What you think of as ‘Facebook’ might be different to what I think of, as we will have taken different approaches in building up our knowledge of what it is, and what it is capable of. MySpace on the other hand is more ‘holistic’ and supports the notion of understanding the general concept in one go straight away and then learning the specifics. It is unlikely that we will have different understandings of what MySpace fundamentally is.

I would have predicted therefore, that those good at languages, mathematics, science, analytical thinking and structured learning would be drawn towards Facebook. Meanwhile, musicians, artists, those who like to daydream and imagine would be drawn more towards MySpace. Both have a place, both have fans and critics.

How to explain the class divide? It’s there but it’s a correlation, not a causation. It may be that children from higher-income households are likely to have genetically inherited structured thinking: the household is higher-income because those skills are more richly rewarded in the job market.

It’s also likely (given we’re talking about teens here) that peer group pressure is going to determine choice: who wants to be the only kid in the group on one social network when everybody else is on another? If you hang out with people who like to conform, they’re likely to be on Facebook. If you hang out with people who like to write poetry, they’re more likely to be on MySpace. If you want to carry on hanging out with them – especially in the cruel World that is governed by US High School cafeteria politics – you’d best turn to the same page they’re on. Or else.

This ‘where my friends are’ factor is critical in this space, for reasons that should be obvious.

Either way, I think it’s way too early to make a clear call on this: whilst teens are dominant on the networks right now, they’re going to grow up and it’s what happens then that is going to give us a better idea of causation and correlation around application choice. Right now, peer pressure within the demographics Boyd is talking about is too big a factor to call it a fair and even fight.

Somebody is going to make a lot of money selling those t-shirts. And ‘facebooked’ has now become a verb like ‘google’. Odd. Pity they’re probably going to go bust then, isn’t it?