Technically, Twitter has stopped displaying what the site's power users call "@replies" — messages broadcast in public, but directed at a specific user — when the viewer doesn't also follow the message's target. Twitter users will still see conversations, but only when they happen entirely within their social circle.

For the attention-deficited social butterflies of Silicon Valley, this is a horrible development: They can no longer ignore their existing friends in favor of constantly finding new ones.

But for the mass market Twitter hopes to tap, this is a great thing. New users find Twitter overwhelming and confusing; some 60 percent drop out after signing up, according to Nielsen, which means Twitter is proving far less capable of retaining an audience than Facebook or MySpace. These Twitter quitters mean that Twitter's growth lies on the edge of a knife. While its traffic numbers are growing at an unheard-of pace, it could lose its audience all too easily.

Social networks always go through a boom followed by a plateau. The trick is to sell out while the growth curve is at its highest. Friendster committed market suicide; MySpace sold far too early, for $580 million; Facebook may have squeezed $240 million out of Microsoft, but many believe it missed its chance for a bigger payday. The risk for Twitter: that it becomes one of those places that's so popular no one goes there anymore.

Twitter's noisiest users are complaining about the change, claiming that it's taken away from Twitter's "conversations." What they're missing: The absence of non-sequitur @replies has made Twitter a far more comprehensible place, especially for the newbies they claim they'd like to talk to.

There's an obvious answer for Twitter's hardcore nerd fanbase, as well as the businesses that have flocked to Twitter to monitor their most passive-aggressive customers' whiny complaints in real-time. Twitter should start charging to let an account broadcast its @replies to everyone. Twitter can make money. Businesses can advertise how responsive their Twitter customer service is through their replies. And people hellbent on talking to strangers can pay for the privilege. Meanwhile, the rest of us will get a place to talk that's not filled with people shouting at strangers. If we wanted that, we'd go to the local park.

Long before Web 2.0, long before MySpace, Twitter, Tumblr, and the like, entrepreneurs were trying to exploit the human urge to communicate. Amazon.com acquired PlanetAll, an online address book and calendar service, in 1998 for $87 million. That same year, AOL bough ICQ, a rival instant-messaging service, for $407 million. Long before Del.icio.us, there was HotLinks, a Web bookmarks service founded by Jonathan Abrams, who would go on to found, yes, Friendster; it was sold for a pittance. And before Ning, there was online community-builder eGroups, swallowed up by Yahoo. And whatever happened to the original SixDegrees.com? Bought for $125 million in 2000, then shuttered the next year amidst the bust.

Did any of those acquisitions benefit the acquirer? In some cases investors made out. But the brands and services are forgotten, neglected by their owners and abandoned by fickle Internet users.

The point is that the ideas of the Web 2.0 craze aren't new. They've merely been rehashed with slicker technology. The only thing that has really changed is the emergence of a new wave of investors with short memories, willing to take a gamble on companies with the appearance of fast growth and popularity.

Wilson is the exception: Someone who ought to know better, but hasn't learned his lesson. Or learned the wrong one. GeoCities was a fluke, driven by the crazed equity markets of the late 1990s, and the madness caused by six dueling portals all eager to establish themselves as the leading Internet destination, and willing to pay anything for pageviews. What does it mean that Yahoo was willing to pay $3.5 billion for GeoCities, but not $3 billion a few years later for Google?

Yahoo is now closing GeoCities, which prompted Wilson to reminisce about his old venture capital firm Flatiron Partners' hundredfold return:

I learned a lot from that deal. I learned that the Internet is all about people expressing themselves on pages they own and control. I learned that a business deal made over dinner and a handshake can turn into hundreds of millions of dollars, I learned that good partners are worth every penny of returns you give up to get them, and I learned that selling too soon is not too painful as long as you don't sell too much. And most of all I learned that you can make 100 times your investment every once in a while. And when you do, it's something special.

GeoCities, which offered people a crude kind of Web presence at a time when most people found building websites too technically intimidating, certainly offers lessons. But perhaps not the ones Wilson has in mind.

Websites which allow us to idle away time with our friends will always attract a large share of our online attention. The lesson of GeoCities is that they're only lucrative as long as there's a greater fool around.

Ringo, their first social site, was an unabashed copy of Friendster. The husband-and-wife team sold that off to Monster, the job-listings site, for a pittance — but a pittance that provided the seed funding for Bebo, which Xochi openly says was inspired by MySpace. Copy early, copy often, sell out. (Photo by Auren Hoffman)

“The economy is tanking and people are arguing about whether they should go to Demo or TechCrunch,” Abrams told the Times. “Few companies sound like they are breaking new ground. It’s like, ‘Here is Twitter for dogs.’ And people still think they are going to get rich by being a blogger.” Hm. Twitter for dogs does sound pretty lame. But then, so did "Friendster for college students."

Facebook has been notoriously stuck up about making sure users are identified strictly by their government names. Now both heavy users generating an excess of pageviews and an application developer that depends on the company's "platform" are feeling the wrath from above for sinning against the terms of service. Certainly the "tyrannical, omnipotent" style of divine rule didn't end up working so well for Friendster — Facebook is popular and growing, but punishing its most devoted acolytes like Job can't work in the long run.

As a side note, a little known fact is that when I was at Friendster, I found a small company out of Harvard that we came very close to acquiring, a startup no one had heard of that time, a company named Thefacebook. I've been an admirer of Zuck and the facebook team for a long time now.

So here's a new chart from Hitwise. It compares the aggregate U.S. market share of OpenSocial partners Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, Plaxo, Linkedin and Ning versus Facebook. Like what you see?

Some will object to this graph because it only covers U.S. market share. Fine, but remember that Facebook isn't an international slouch either, with 60 percent of its users based outside the U.S. and 11 million members in Canada and the U.K. alone.

And the other problem? As far as I can tell, OpenSocial does not yet interconnect social networks. So widget makers seeking a U.S. audience — the one advertisers today are most willing to pay for — won't get the kind of viral growth they can on Facebook. Their apps will be stranded on small islands, without the critical mass that causes the rapid spread some Facebook apps have seen.

Apologists will continue to hype OpenSocial, arguing that Google Gang users, in aggregrate, will lure developers away from the Facebook platform or at least weaken Facebook's hold on them. But the looks of these charts, do you see that happening?

• The New York Times: Google's Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning
  
• O'Reilly's Radar: Hi5, iLike, Slide, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning and Six Apart
  
• TechCrunch: Orkut, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle
  
• Valleywag: Hi5, Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Ning, Salesforce.com, and Oracle

Guess the only way to find out for sure who's involved is to attend CampFire Thursday night on the Google campus. We would, but we have a thing against CamelCase. But bring us back a s'more, wouldja?

(Photo by russelljsmith)

The New York Times covered a lot of ground in writing about the net this weekend, but I noticed a weird trend:

• "Joining the party, eager to make friends" — Times headline for a story on marketing in social networks. Later, writer Saul Hansell says, "Companies from Procter & Gamble to J. P. Morgan Chase, like so many lonely teenagers, are tricking out their online profiles and trying to make friends on the Web." [NY Times]
• "Wallflower at the Web party" — Headline for Gary Rivlin's article on the fall of Friendster and its CEO, Jonathan Abrams, who turned down a $30 million Google buyout that would have made him a billionaire today. [NY Times]
• "Google is very leading edge, very young and very appealing to 20- and 30-year-olds. If you walked around with a Google T-shirt, people would think that's a hip thing to wear." — a professor quoted in a Times piece on how Google fills young people's lives. [NY Times]

Looks like the Times just wants in on the party.

Below is the condensed version; for more, read the full version. — Nick

By Trent Lapinski

About four months ago I was hired by an online publisher as a freelance journalist to write an article detailing the history and business model of MySpace.com (the project has previously been mentioned on this blog). After months of journalistic research and interviews I finally sought comment from News Corp. Instead of getting comments or an interview from News Corp., they began harassing my employer. Due to groundless legal implications, the article I had written was no longer to be published. However, I now own the rights to my work and after weeks of looking for support and contemplating the situation I have decided to publish the article in its entirety on Valleywag.

It is possible that News Corp. may attempt to pursue legal action against me for publishing this work, but this article has been professionally fact checked and is the truth.

The reader's digest version below breaks things down very simply and quotes sections of the upcoming article, as well as provides links to documentation proving said information.

What News Corp. doesn't want you to know about MySpace

1. MySpace is NOT a viral success. MySpace was advertised on mass levels to reach the public. MySpace was created by a company named eUniverse (who later changed their name to Intermix Media). eUniverse was a marketing and entertainment company who had over 50 million e-mail addresses in their databases, as well as over 18 million monthly web users. eUniverse leveraged their resources to proliferate and advertise MySpace.com. eUniverse went as far as telling 3 million users of their paid dating website, CupidJunction.com, to sign up for free MySpace accounts. (CupidJunction message screenshot)

2. MySpace.com is Spam 2.0. MySpace has spawned an incredibly successful twist on the age-old art of self-promotion, allowing—even encouraging—the marketing of everything from bands to businesses on their site. Essentially, they've opened up a channel through which to solicit and promote everyone and everything, most importantly the individual. The whole site is, in essence, a marketing tool that everyone who registers has access to. Users constantly receive spam-like messages from said bands, business, and individuals looking to add more "friends" (and therefore more potential fans, consumers, or witnesses) to their online identity. A testament to this strange new social paradigm is the phrase "Thanks for the Add," a nicety offered when one MySpace user adds another as a friend. Best yet, to use the site, members must log in, causing them to inadvertently view advertisements, and then read their messages on a page with even more advertisements. In the world of MySpace, Spam is earth, air, fire, and water.

3. Tom Anderson did NOT create MySpace. Most users don't know that Tom Anderson (pictured) is more of a PR scheme than anything else—the mascot designed to give a friendlier feel to a site created by a marketing company known for viral entertainment websites, pop-up advertising, spam, spyware, and adware. As MySpace's popularity grew, the MySpace team moved to create a false PR story that would best reflect the ideals and tastes of its growing demographic. They wanted to prevent the revelation that a Spam 1.0 company had launched the site, and created the impression that Tom Anderson created the site, and the lie worked. According to Anderson, the bulk of his initial contribution is as follows: "I am as anti-social as they come, and I've already got 20 people to sign up."

4. MySpace's CEO Chris DeWolfe is connected to a past of spam and shady business associates and brought those connections to eUniverse/MySpace (see full edition for details).

5. MySpace was a direct assault on Friendster.com. The major key players in the ultimate development of MySpace have Friendster accounts, and name Friendster and its founder in their original business proposal. The current CEO of MySpace, Chris DeWolfe has been a member of Friendster since June of 2003 (MySpace was not conceived until August of 2003).