Teen Girls More Tech Savvy Than Boys?
Anyone who has teenaged kids is aware (or should be) of what they are doing online. I have a 17-year-old boy, and a 13-year-old girl. IM is a given, as is my son’s cell phone when he’s way from his laptop. When he’s online, he plays video games almost exclusively. Runescape is a favorite of his. Has a Facebook account but rarely uses it. Surfs the web somewhat, using it mostly as a info applicance. And he doesn’t pay much attention to video and photo sharing sites or to blogs.
My daughter couldn’t be more different. Sure IM and the cellphone are the same; but she and her friends are heavy text-messagers and photo snappers. (Things we’ve needed to put a bit of a limit on.) And they’ll all got active MySpace pages, and know YouTube and Flickr well. Surfs the web for the latests fashions, not caring whether she’s on a blog or a traditional website. She’s also very adept at using iTunes. Hasn’t bought a CD in years. And hasn’t touched a video game or online fantasy game since SimLife a couple of years ago.
Other parents I’ve talked to have notice something similar. With variations on the theme, most would agree that boys play more solitary games online, and that girls are much more social beings on the web. (Just think how much time they still spend on the phone, as compare to boys.)
But I didn’t give this much notice until a friend pointed out this article in The Guardian newpaper, which describes a study illustrating the digital divide between boys and girls. And a little surfing found this story at ABC News online which describes the study and its implications in greater detail.
Warning boys: seems like girls are staking out their own territory in the online gaming world — what used to be exclusive to you!
Working and Living the Second Life Way
I read Business Week every week. Not necessarily from cover to cover, but pretty close to it. Although I think that it is a quality publication and clearly I derive value from reading it regularly, honestly there is not too much in there that really surprises me. This week’s edition is definitely an exception to that rule.
The cover story is about the virtual world of Second Life. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a Web-based massively multiplayer game. But, unlike most games in this genre (i.e. World of Warcraft) where the players have missions and are somewhat guided by the game, Second Life has absolutely no game-imposed limitations. It exists as a virtual world where the people themselves form the landscape, culture, goals, etc. through interaction, just as we do in the real world.
Now, that in and of itself is not news. If that were the whole story I would have simply flipped past it – online virtual words are old news. What made me stop, and what I still cannot believe, is that through this world people are actually making REAL livings creating virtual properties, goods, and services! How?
The game has a currency system pegged to U.S. dollars, and players can use a credit card to buy and redeem real dollars based on those earned / spent within the game itself. It also enables players to use tools to build their own items within the game, and to maintain the property rights to those items. Again this is not that shocking to me. Maybe it is a neat feature, but so what? I can buy and sell virtual clothes and cars and houses, oh my.
The thing that is overloading my logic circuits is that, according to the Business Week article, there are people earning $90,000 in real U.S. dollars a year selling within the game, and people with hundreds of thousands of dollars of virtual real estate holdings. More mind blowing, this level of economic activity is coming from a relatively small group of people – just 170,000 players. That means that each of them is spending some serious real world money every month for these virtual goods and services. That is, of course, unless there is some funny Enron-style accounting going on in the World of Second Life.
OK, moving beyond that ludicrousness, something else the article discussed was real companies using Second Life to mock up products, test advertising, and conduct training. Now, that makes a lot of sense to me. By doing these things virtually, companies can save a large amount of money. The Second Life world functions very similarly to our own world, and the people who interact within it are real people. Advertisers, market researchers, and product designers can clearly save time and money by conducting all of this online.
I have to wonder if this “game” will eventually morph more into a business tool than a pseudo-social entertainment experience. I suppose that they are really too interdependent for one to fully evolve without the other. I also wonder if this can reach a critical mass and sustain it over time. We will just have to wait and see.
Weighing in on AOL’s Rumored “MySpace Killer”
The blogosphere is abuzz with rumors that AOL is about to launch a social networking site to compete with MySpace. Word is that the new tool will be tied to the AIM instant messaging tool, tapping in to the 43 million users of that service and their existing “buddy” lists. A couple of thoughts on this:
(1) I think it’s inevitable that MySpace starts showing some vulnerability and that a competitor rises up to challenge its’ dominance. Why? Its’ users, 13-18 year olds, are trend followers and will abandon MySpace in a second if something perceived as cooler comes along. I think social networks are here to stay, but MySpace’s dominance of the space is a trend. I personally think we’ll move towards more niche communities instead of massive networks like MySpace and the new AOL network. I’ve been wrong before though.
(2) Isn’t what is being described pretty much MSN Spaces, which is the social networking site tied to MSN Messenger that I don’t think anyone uses? This is all rumor at this point, so we’ll see if there is more to it than that.
Politicians Spotted on MySpace
I got an email from a colleague pointing me to the MySpace page of Allan Lichtman, a Democrat running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Maryland. This is the first politican I’ve seen with a MySpace profile, although I haven’t looked that hard. With 250,000 new users signing up every day and 66 million total users, I’d look for more politicians to try to tap in to the MySpace phenomenon.
Note: Lichtman (or one of his staffers) was actually logged on to MySpace when I visited and took the screenshot below.
Update: I got an email from a reader and there is another Senate candidate with a MySpace page. Meet Pete Ashdown, who is running against Senator Orin Hatch in Utah.
Update #2 (May 8, 2006): I came across another one. Check out California gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides on MySpace. There is a San Francisco Examiner article about this candidates My Space.
Leave a comment if you know of more.