Big Media LOVES Social Networking

Check out Today's New York Times: Big Media's Crush on Social Networking. Second Life (also MySpace and FaceBook) continue to get first dibs at all the buzz, particularly from the big boy business press.

It's often about the money and the players rather than about the value-add to real consumers. I helped London-based 3B launch at the Web 2.0 conference in November and as soon as people realized it was Second Life-like, we had a bigger audience.

Interestingly he refers to LinkedIn as a MySpace for grown-ups based on a recent Business 2.0 magazine article. Frankly, as a LinkedIn user with well over 1,000 contacts, I don't see any comparison at all. Client eSnips is more of a MySpace for grown-ups but because of so much buzz around social networking sites and the fact that there are so many, they often get lumped together as serving the same purpose.

This reporter claims he's into antisocial networking. He talks about issues around social networking, such as a representation of how one lives their life online. He says, "In many ways, it is the two-dimensional version of what sites like Second Life aspire to be in 3-D: the digital you. And that ties to another earnestly overused term of art at the moment: engagement."

Engagement, he notes, is about how much time people "spend doing one thing — reading a magazine, watching a TV show — but also to the depth of their participation." And all the big media boys are trying to gobble up what's there, as soon as they see significant audience growth, including the likes of Sony, Disney, Hearst, CBS, Viacom and NBC.

I still don't get it, but clearly I'm not the target audience. Given how much time I spend online, the fact that I blog daily and am interested in engaging with people, I wonder who is outside the teenage and youth market.