A Bit More Detail

• Dangerous Minds notes "Mingering Mike", a fictional soul music star created by an outsider artist.


• Noisey takes a look at the roots of Madonna in the post-punk music scene of New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s.


• Dangerous Minds looks at the Alex Chilton anti-AIDS song of 1986, "No Sex."


• NOW Toronto interviewed iskwe in February about her music commemorating dead Indigenous people in Canada.


• Damon Krukowski writes at Pitchfork about the implications of the accidental deletion by Myspace of a decade and a half worth of music there. How can libraries and archives be preserved against the vagaries of technology?

First, the audience it stole from Friendster left for Facebook. Now, Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive Rupert Murdoch hired less than a year ago to reverse the site’s declining fortunes, has also left, MySpace announced late Wednesday night.

The bell has been tolling for MySpace for years, with users leaving the site pretty much as they found it: as a place to hear what a band sounds like and see what they look like in a matter of seconds, rather than as a place where they establish an online identity and communicate with friends.

After signing on last April, Van Natta wisely acknowledged this change in how people were using MySpace — as a media site rather than as a social network — by doubling down on the ad-supported MySpace Music service. However, the company was not able to fix problems with the service including poor integration with existing band pages, which left many users confused or uninterested in the service.

According to an Ad Age source, Van Natta bailed on MySpace because he was frustrated by the company’s “slow pace of change” and “entrenched culture.” A dearth of fast, competent, loyal software engineers in the Los Angeles area reportedly slowed things down even further. MySpace is headquartered in Beverly Hills, in southern California. Facebook, which evolves its design and feature set so often that some users can’t keep up with the changes, is located in the more technology-oriented Palo Alto, California.

Nearly a year ago—in the course of cajoling people into joining the ubiquitous social network—I marveled at Facebook's astonishing growth rate: The site had just signed up its 150 millionth member, and about 370,000 people were joining every day. "At this rate," I wrote, "Facebook will grow to nearly 300 million people by this time next year." I confess, though, that I didn't think it was possible for the site to keep growing at that rate. Every hot Web site begins to fade at some point, and back then, the tech world was enamored of an upstart that was gaining lots of attention from celebrities and the media—Twitter. Even Facebook seemed scared of the micro-blogging site. In June, it redesigned its user pages to display updates as quickly as Twitter does, a move that prompted a barrage of threats to quit.

Those threats were empty. And so, it seems, was any threat posed by Twitter. Facebook's growth rate has actually accelerated during the past year. In September, it announced that it had reached 300 million members, and this week, it passed 350 million. About 600,000 people around the world now sign up every day. Twitter hasn't released any recent usage numbers, but traffic to its site is flattening. Indeed, it's likely that Twitter has fewer members than the number of people who play the Facebook game FarmVille (69 million!).

With Facebook Connect, the company is expanding its footprint beyond Facebook.com, spidering into every far-flung corner online. You can now update your Facebook status, add comments, or chat with your friends while surfing CNN, the Huffington Post, Yelp, Digg, and Slate, among other sites. On Wednesday, Yahoo announced that it would integrate Facebook Connect with all of its services. Though Yahoo hasn't explained how the partnership will work, you'll presumably be able to share your photos between Flickr (owned by Yahoo) and Facebook or comment on stories at Yahoo News using your Facebook profile. This huge partnership will bring Facebook closer to becoming what has long been a holy grail in the Web business—a kind of universal sign-on service, the one place that stores the world's social information.

Facebook's continued rise prompts several questions. Why do people keep joining? Will it peak and begin to decline, like so many social networks that came before? And more importantly, do we want a universal sign-on service, a single Web site that stores all our relationships, comments, pictures, and status updates?

Yes, I think we do. In fact, I'd argue that's why Facebook keeps growing and won't peak anytime soon—it is becoming part of the infrastructure of the Web, every bit as indispensable to our daily wanderings as Google or e-mail. When I pushed people to join Facebook in January, I reasoned that the site had become "a routine aid to social interaction, like e-mail and antiperspirant." In the months since, that has only become more true. It's the first place you think of to find new pictures of your nephew, to share an amusing anecdote with your college friends, or even to look for a job. The New York Times' Nick Bilton points out that Facebook's mutual-friends list transforms new relationships: "When I go to a meeting or party, I take a minute to look up who's attending and quickly explore friends we might share," he writes. "It's the perfect digital icebreaker."

Canadian Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother (a.k.a jaimeleigh) is supposedly a Tumblette: young, sexy and an over-sharer. The Tumblette — a vogue-ish tag for a female type who blogs on the website Tumblr — “lifecasts” with an edge.

[. . . ]

On her “for the story goes” Tumblr, the Toronto-based Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother bares all daily — from a series of self-point-and-shoot photos the 20-something blond snapped for a Semi-Naked-Picture-Day, to a controversial posting that included a spreadsheet mapping her bed-hopping history.

“People have a weird love for these sexual things,” says Fairbrother, who in person, is surprisingly demure. “We all talk about it... yet if you’re honest and shameless about it, you’re judged.”

At first glance, Fairbrother’s Tumblr is a female version of Tucker Max, whose drunken bro-ish hijinks recently made it to the big screen in I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

It’s made Fairbrother a love-her-or-hate-her Tumblette: She’s garnered a cult of 800 to 900 active followers and, last week, was ranking higher than other micro-celebrities and fellow oversharers, like Internet star Julia Allison.

Fairbrother’s quick to recognize her Tumblr began over a year ago as a lonely, soliloquy-ing stream.

Her postings quickly garnered followers, especially through Tumblr’s unique re-blogging feature — the re-posting of content allows users to trace how one post is amplified or subverted by other users — which created a dialogue that would bounce between her, her followers and even non-followers.

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Danah Boyd, a sociologist and researcher in the U.S. who specializes in youth culture and online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, has posted a draft version of a new paper she is writing on what might loosely be referred to as "class divisions" between the two popular social networking sites. Although she says that the differences between the two audiences are not strictly class-based, in the sense that they don't really follow economic lines, there appears to be a clear difference between teens who gravitate to MySpace and those that tend to join Facebook.

For the most part, Ms. Boyd says, the younger users on MySpace are what she calls "subaltern" -- a term meaning subordinate, or lower in station -- in the sense that they are outcasts in some way or another, either because they are involved in a social sub-group of some kind (i.e., they are gay, or goth, or interested in punk music) or they are a member of a racial or cultural group that is non-mainstream (i.e., black, Hispanic, Asian, etc.). Teens that join Facebook, she says, are what she calls "hegemonic," meaning they are sympathetic to mainstream society in some way.

The conclusions coincide, satisfyingly, with the presumptions of Facebook users with snobbish disdain for the ghetto design of Myspace pages. They're probably true. And Boyd's essay has the patina of academic credibility, obtained through the liberal use of lingo from critical theory such as "hegemonic" -- by which I think the author means the cool kids. But, astonishingly, there's a complete lack of survey data to support the thesis. If this Berkeley PhD candidate really had six months for the project, how hard would it be to recruit a few hundred survey respondents? And some of the conclusions are truly pedestrian: the research suggests that Facebook users are more likely to go to college. Well, Mark Zuckerberg's social utility started -- duh -- as an online facebook for college students, so it's hardly so surprising that it would do well among that demo.