Facebook is the new MySpace.  How many times have we already heard this one?

ClickZgot me onto the down-with-MySpace, up-with-Facebook craze with an article they published way, way back in April.  In it, Tessa Wegert took the non-student (me) through the differences between MySpace and Facebook as well as the effect open membership has had on turning the tide in Facebook’s favor.

She wrote:

I’ve witnessed this expansion firsthand. When I joined a month ago, I couldn’t find a soul I knew in my age range. Within a few weeks, old classmates, friends, and coworkers swarmed in, as if collectively awakening from social networking hibernation.

It’s hard to pinpoint the appeal. In contrast to MySpace, Facebook is clean and clutter-free insofar as content and advertising are concerned. Because it only recently became available to the public, it’s also still a novelty. That said, users who now log in several times a day to check the status of friends and view newly posted photos may see their interest and dedication taper off in months to come.

As I feed my own Facebook addiction, what’s most interesting is how this youth community site is growing up. Certainly, its evolution promises to change the way advertisers view it and incorporate it into media plans.

Two things stood out in these paragraphs.  For one, she indicated that interest may “taper off in months to come” without good reason.  Second, she was currently experiencing an addiction to Facebook. 

Addiction followed by taper off.  This is a big deal few are addressing, so I decided to give it a go.

The first thing I did was dig up some numbers showing the effect of social networks on real, human, face-to-face communication.  Pew has done some good work in this area, and their data (click on the link for the numbers) indicates there are two types of ties - core ties and significant ties - of which the average person has 50.  Combined, our ties to these 50 remain relatively stable through the use of online tools like social networking sites and email. Taking this into consideration, I built this foundation:

Online social networking tools complement in-person communication.   

Therefore, we want MySpace, Second Life, Facebook, etc. to complement our in-person communication, but the question of why we jump from one service to the next still remains.

I then came across this thesisfrom Caroline Haythornthwaite (that’s 15 letters, folks) at UI Urbana.  She recently did a study examining how the Internet and computer media support social community:

Asking about media use as well as about the strength of the tie between communicating pairs revealed that those more strongly tied used more media to communicate than weak ties, and that media use within groups conformed to a unidimensional scale, showing a configuration of different tiers of media use supporting social networks of different ties strengths. 

Let’s try to make sense of that:

Your level of online communication correlates with the strength of your ties.

Combined, the fact you want online communication but use it to the same degree as your ties partially answers the reasons we keep bouncing around.  We’re looking for a solution to keeping track of our networks but haven’t found it.

What MySpace is experiencing is not a loss of interest but a loss of novelty.  I would argue that people were never really that interested in MySpace to begin with; they just thought it was a novel way to interact. 

The novelty was that you could find out what happened to that girl you had a crush on in the 10th grade by searching for her on MySpace.  You could scramble around and find her social network, maybe even tap into it and drop her a request to become your ”friend”.  Not that I did this.  That’s sort of weird.  But it happens.

Then, after a while, you realize that this whole “friends” business is a game you are playing against yourself.  Who cares how many “friends” you have if you never even connect with them or ask them how they are doing?  Are they “friends” or steps towards an unattainable goal?

Moreover, you have to log onto MySpace at least once a day just to see if you got any messages from people outside your 50.  This is tiresome because you are already keeping track of 2+ email accounts, so you stop logging into MySpace.  Addiction followed by taper off.  Case in point.

The same issues face, well, Facebook.  Looking past the current fanfare, my guess is people will get bored building their Facebook network because it does not replace the ways in which we already effectively communicate with our core and significant ties.  It is another account to deal with, another garden to tend to, and another system of keeping information that is isolated from the others we maintain.

What we need is something that goes beyond MySpace/Facebook novelty.  We need a Virtual Rolodex. 

• The Virtual Rolodex will have a place for each person’s name, number, email, extended network, etc. - the basics of MySpace or Facebook
• The Virtual Rolodex will be intertwined with personal email accounts.  Think less Facebook and more Gmail. 
• The Virtual Rolodex will have the ability to map networks.  Think family trees combined with spider webs.
• The Virtual Rolodex will not be made by Rolodex.

What else?