Do give me your feedback and ideas to this piece. HERE
We also have loads of fansites though, where lots of small individual groups achieve a common goal of producing a popular website that features Habbo content- it must be a participation space
http://www.habbo.co.uk/community/fansites
Oh but I missed out that we are predominantly a virtual world
http://www.habbo.co.uk/client
and thus a performing space… even though in this space you can also watch celebs perform in Habbo via our ‘Habbovision’ feature where 1000 Habbos can (only) watch the room together at the same time. Does this also make Habbo a watching space?
My conclusion then must be that Habbo is everything, although I don’t think the user would perceive this. The audience use Habbo for what they want to use it for. We also have an IM feature but people are always asking for MSN details, because they IM better than we do. Users define what a web service is but often this is a very blurred and individual perspective that is not useful in generalising what a web service is as “a way of describing social media spaces in a way that can be shared by both traditional media indies and digital media agencies.”
Each social network that appears initially has a USP. See http://www.myyearbook.com for the latest. However what is seen time and time again is that when these services achieve a critical mass that they begin to offer ‘everything’ in order to meet all of the users needs simultaneously in order to keep them on the site for as long as possible. This unravels the initial differentiation that they started with. Facebook was a university social network, but is now open to anyone. MySpace has a slight differentiation in that it has a strong music focus, but you can now do this on Facebook anyway. As people can use most of these sites, including Habbo, to do most of the same thing it does not make sense to focus categorisation on how it is used by the consumer.
As such there is a mass blurring in definitions between the different services on offer today. For me social networks are an email program, but then I know better than to label it that… or do I?
