However, Facebook is also a very practical tool for organising contacts and keeping in touch, and with regard to viral marketing chaos, MySpace is so much worse, anyway (I had a MySpace profile first).

99 % of MySpace profiles are unbelievable ugly and shows a terrifying lack of flair for visual design, or maybe it is just the way the software transforms users’ visual ideas into tasteless, blinking, disturbing, hopeless, accumulating crap. Moreover, 99 % of all “friends” on MySpace are viral marketers or stupid American teenagers with fake identities and no real life of any substance. On Facebook, everyone in my network is someone I know in real life. With one exception though… but in that case I know her real name, employer, job role and work history, have read her postings over years in another forum, and interviewed her friend for a student project. My Facebook network contains only former classmates and colleges, family members, friends’ friends who I have met in parties or been bushwalking with. The privacy settings protect my network and profile from search engines and filter out external noise. MySpace can’t compete with that…

I wonder what the trajectory has been at deviantart.com in similar terms? I haven’t spend enough time there to know. I know there were some agonistic debates over commercialisation, with tropes of ‘betrayal’ of the original subculture/early adopters.

By the way, I still think that the particular culture that has emerged/been cultivated in Flickr is why it is perceieved as a success by, not only the core enthusiasts who populate it, but also a wider ‘public’ who want to find ‘good images’ – where ‘good’, because of the interestingness thing, doesn’t mean a reflection of elitist cultural values at all, but is genuinely popular and includes things like ‘discussability’ as well as prettiness.

Anyway, this is a much longer conversation – let’s continue it!

There are a few discussions about ‘art’ going on in the new red bubble dot com community atm – an ‘arts’ community (initially conceived as a marketing scheme for printing art and photos but _actually_ hijacked by ‘ordinary’ punters who like sharing their pictures with online buddies and certainly don’t meet the standards of turtle-neck types) which is negotiating its way through decisions about the ‘type’ of art it should be selling and promoting.

It seems that the inevitable (and, for me, quite wonderful) push has been ‘downwards’ – as an example, there was muted disgust about members using the site to upload candid pics from camera phones for printing. The High Art types were Not Amused. Apparently ‘art’ means ‘professional’, involving stacks of expensive technology and carefully managed (and marked-by-class) ‘talent’. Not for scruffs, in other words.

Yet truly ‘professional’ artists (whether photographers, illustrated or what-e-ver) avoid the site for very fact that it makes it impossible to ‘control’ your art: exclusivity is all in the ‘art world’ and a social networking site centered on what is (essentially) community art practice and discussion really doesn’t provide that.

The question now is whether the scruffs will actually keep the business afloat.