Culture

We'd Rather Just Poke Each Other

by jordan | April 23, 2007 at 04:17 pm | 1244 views | 6 comments | 15 recommendations

Social Networking sites are, for the first time, beginning to rival porn sites in terms of sheer traffic. While porn remains the number one destination for American web users, the social networks whose infrastructure derives from porn sites have cemented their spot in the online firmament. The article below outlines how pornographers helped built the web, and how that led to a happy ending for the likes of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and the rest.

Overall, the amount of Web traffic attracted by social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook has begun to rival porn sites in recent months, says the market-research firm Hitwise.

"Pornography is probably as popular as it ever was, but there's a whole bunch more people who are constructing their (social) identities online," said Mark Federman, former chief strategist with the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology.

Pornography has always been in the vanguard of new technology, he said. The genre was quick to exploit the arrival of photography, filmmaking and home videos.

Internet purveyors pioneered cached servers, secure online payment and high-quality flash video. Recently, the porn industry sought to offer soft-core downloads to video-enabled cellphones.

It might even be said that by distributing illicit materials to strictly private lists of customers, porn was a precursor of closed social networks like Facebook and Bebo now making an impact on the Internet.

"They pioneered the idea of the trusted social network, to distribute criminal content," Federman said.

Porn has been found on the walls of ancient Pompey, so it's no shock that it still claims the largest slice of Web traffic – about 13 per cent in the U.S.

But its foothold is being challenged by sites like MySpace, the most popular website in the U.S. according to Hitwise. (The firm collates traffic from 10 million Internet users.)