While adult bloggers talk about building an identity through extended blogging, i keep finding teens who got locked out of Xanga and responded by making another Xanga (or a Blogger or a LiveJournal). They have expressions scattered across numerous services with numerous handles. Some teens chew through IM handles like candy; their nicks are things like “o-so-funny” rather than the first name, last name standard that seems to pervade professional worlds. It’s not seen as something to build an extensive identity around, but something to use to talk to friends in the moment.—ephemeral profiles
A very interesting post, first for the content itself, I didn’t realize that teens were “shedding” profiles like that but also interesting in business terms, yet another proof that user numbers, as they are used, don’t mean all that much.
I’d loooove to see MySpace (and Second Life) stats taking into account actual account usage, not just creation. For VomitSpace I’m sure the picture would be completely different, especially merged with the unnecessary click factory correction.
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I have totally noticed this in my younger brothers (if not to an imiportant degree myself at that age). At this point if I want to send one of them a link I write it down and hand it to them when I see them, i just can’t keep track of all the email adresses (and yes, they are incredibly long and overbearing adresses, like xx_robby_doh_love_master_xx@hotmail.com).
One of the weirdest things that kept happening was the “one of my friends hacked into my account and changed the password and now they won’t tell me the new one” wherein hacking means they knew the old password because it was easily guessable or someone was aware of it. Why would they do this to each other?
Not only young people, a friend of mine is changing at a tremenduous pace. She keeps sending me her new messenger ids I think I have in the addressbook, something like 20 ids, that I know for her and she is 32.
And what is her reason for that? Loses passwords? Just for change? Stalkers?