Index

Response to “Six Spaces of Social Media “

August 16, 2007

See; http://www.test.org.uk/archives/002852.html

I literally read this the day before last and I thought that it was interesting, but there are so many ways to categorise something and I don’t think Matt Lock, the author of this piece, has moved any closer than Bear Stearns suggestions. I do however acknowledge that categorisation is a difficult endeavour and that often a few are required to meet the end users requirements.

Lock has tried to apply need of the end user, but this is problematic since people use everything for very different reasons, especially online where there is greater, and increasing overlap between what services offer. MySpace for example started off as a “Group Space” where people could create their friends list and build their group network, however since MySpace allows HTML coding people’s pages take on a “Publishing Space” and people add various images they have made, show off their ‘arty’ pics of themselves etc. Now however everyone seems to hate MySpace in favour of Facebook, so for these people it is now a “secret space” where they just use it to email their friends who still use the service. As such it is not possible to use these categories to pigeonhole an online service since it would vary for everyone and this does not represent a useful categorisation from the web

service’s point of view.

Habbo for example has a social networking facility, which means it is a group space;

www.habbo.co.uk/home/ukchaseral

but you can make your own movie and share it with people on Habbo or export it to another website (like your MySpace page), which means Habbo is also a UGC publishing site…

…hang on there are also group spaces where people reinforce the identity of their group, so it is back to being a group space

http://www.habbo.co.uk/groups