I think these stories are largely based on tenets gleaned from wishful thinking and accepted wisdom, plumped up with an anecdote or two:

(a) big, successful things are bound to fail sooner or later;

(b) teens are so fickle, always looking for the next big thing.

MySpace usage ramped up heavily during its first year and a half, hitting 2 hours and 25 minutes in October last year. Then it dropped to about 2 hours and held relatively steady there for the past year. Facebook, a younger networking site, is still on a gradual incline, reaching 1 hour and 9 minutes last month. […]

Right, so setting up your MySpace profile is quite time-consuming. Maintaining it is not.

“They’re not loyal,” Ben Bajarin, a market analyst for Creative Strategies Inc., said of the youth demographic. Young audiences search for innovative and new features. They’re constantly looking for new ways to communicate and share content they find or create, and because of that group mentality, friends shift from service to service in blocs.

Not exactly scientific, eh? nor is the remaining ‘evidence’. Personally, I think a lot of journalists and media analysts are the ones always looking for the next big thing. Valleywag seems to agree.

Madeline Dell’Aria, another high school junior, has fallen in and out of love with a number of sites. In middle school she started avidly blogging on Xanga. Last year, after most of her friends abandoned Xanga and migrated to MySpace, she followed. “No one was using Xanga anymore,” she said.

Initially, MySpace drew her in, and she spent lots of time looking at her friend’s photos or leaving comments on their pages, she said. Now, only a year or so later, ennui is setting in. She spends a lot less time on the site, instead listening to music or talking on the phone, she said. […]

So it’s become one among a number of communications media used by this person. No real surprises there. The MySpace spokeswoman seems to offer some conflicting information:

“There will always be anecdotes of people that love MySpace and people that don’t,” a spokeswoman for the site said, but the site is adding an average of 320,000 new profiles every day and continuing to go mainstream. In the past year it launched new services such as mobile and video channels, and expanded internationally.

This is what I think. MySpace remains massive, ten times bigger than any competing network. At the same time, there is a lot of churn –the 100mn+ profiles on the system are nowhere near all in use. A lot of them might have been created by curious adults, for example. Others belong to users who have migrated elsewhere but haven’t deleted their profiles, perhaps because they still use MySpace for music and for certain friends.

• 67% share music with their friends, with 15% sharing “a lot of it”
• 15% have swapped hard disks or iPod/MP3 hard disks to share music (rising to 17% of legal downloaders and 24% of illegal downloaders)
• 31% use Instant Messenger to share music with the majority downloading and sending
• 33% create compilations to share with friends
• 22% use email to share music
• 50% do at least one of the following activities to share music: use IM, use email, share hard disks or download illegally

Cost was cited as the main reason for sharing music, though most of those surveyed still value physical CD purchases more highly than digital formats, viewing it as the ‘complete package’. The impact of social networks like bebo and myspace on music discovery and consumption is also very high. Among those who were members of these sorts of sites:

• 23% state using these sites has a “massive” or “big” impact on their music purchases
• 49% regularly or occasionally recommend artists to others on these sites
• 57% have “discovered music that I love”
• 31% have purchased downloads or CDs of music discovered on these sites
• 12% regularly download music for free

I would suggest that most people underplay the idea that they are influenced by others in their music tastes. We like to think we form our tastes independently. Therefore, the influence of social networks could be even higher than these figures show.

Podcasts remain a minority activity, with 65% of the sample never having downloaded a podcast. Only one percent of the sample downloaded a podcast on a daily basis. The research also found that demand for mobile phones with a music player outstrips demand for iPods by a factor of almost 2:1.

But obviously, there’s a catch. Actually, there are several catches that have already disenchanted commentators:

1. The service will be ad-supported. You will be forced somehow to watch adverts as you browse and download.
2. The music will be in Microsoft’s digitally protected format, so you can’t share it, or play it on an iPod.
3. You will have to re-visit the site from time to time, possibly monthly, to extend your license for the music. It’s not known yet whether if you download songs every day for a month, that means you’ll have to go back every day from then on.
4. There is talk that the your license for downloaded tracks will run out altogether after six months.

The service has an extensive and experienced board and management team. But errmm. does anyone remember freeloader.com? Basically, it was a site that allowed people to download games for free, but you had to watch adverts as you downloaded, the games would only work on the downloader’s machine and connected back to the site to check their licences. As I recall, they went tits-up in 2001.

You might argue that near universal broadband penetration makes such a business model a lot more likely to succeed now, and that, in any case, the dotcom crash would have killed freeloader’s ad revenues even if the service would have been successful otherwise. In some ways I am sure that is true. Except that (a) forcing people to watch adverts is a terrible idea, especially if your target demographic is Generation Y; (b) forcing users to go back to your site every month is really bad; © teenagers don’t think copying CDs is a crime — I would assume that would also apply to P2P music networks like SoulSeek.

Update: I’ve ruminated about this thing a bit. I reckon as a mass market service, with a massive ad budget, they’ve got a chance. Most web users only visit six sites.

Professor Ruth Aylett, Professor of Computing Science at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University believes that with young people increasingly familiar with computer games and story-telling through virtual reality worlds, the opportunity to interact with characters who are ‘virtually’ facing the same sort of problems that the pupils might be suffering in their everyday lives could be immensely beneficial.

“If you’re a young person facing some sort of bullying on a regular basis the problem can seem too big, too overwhelming, to tackle. What we will be developing is a virtual world where the user can interface directly with a synthetic character who is also a bullying victim. That bullying scenario is played out on the screen then the user can interface with the synthetic character, discuss what has happened and make choices about how the character might like to react in future. They can then watch the next scenario and see what sort of impact that advice has in how things turn out. That way, instead of what feels like a huge problem in their own lives the decisions are broken down into bite-sized chunks affecting a virtual character.“

Any attempt to tackle bullying is clearly a good thing, and the initial results have been promising: “children like the interaction with the virtual characters and find the content highly interesting and believable”. The main usability issue has apparently been the quality of the graphics. It’s an interesting approach, though bullies themselves appear to be keeping abreast of the latest technology. On March 31, a four-year study was presented to the British Psychological Society, which revealed that nearly 15% of 11,227 children had been victims of cyber-bullying.

The study finds that instant messaging language does mirror patterns in speech, but that teens, surprisingly, are actually using a fusion of different levels of diction. Teens are using both informal forms that their English teachers would never allow, yet they also use formal writing phrasing that, if used in speech, would likely be considered “uncool.”

“Everybody thinks kids are ruining their language by using instant messaging, but these teens’ messaging shows them expressing themselves flexibly through all registers,” says Tagliamonte. “They actually show an extremely lucid command of the language. We shouldn’t worry.”

Via slashdot