xoxietyblog

David Henderson writes this from the F8 Facebook developers’ conference, about his realization of who the Web 2.0 audience really is:

They don’t read techcrunch
They don’t blog
They don’t use most of the 2.0 apps out there
They’re mostly female
They’re mostly 18 - 24 and 25 - 34
They live on Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, etc…

There’s something about social networking that is decidedly feminine, I think. That it’s reticular v. heirarchical?  I think of estrogen as relational, and testosterone as vertical. We all have a bit of each, in varying degrees. I wonder if we’re not missing something in all our discussions of the web, by always taking a geek cowboy point of view? Networks grow by procreation and proliferation, not by conquest and occupation of space.

I wonder sometimes if our discussions aren’t missing the point, when it comes to the web–which is by its very nature a network, of course. I think it’s easier for us to document and celebrate vertical, masculine-style phenomena, in part because our homeric tradition of storytelling lends itself to such a task. It’s much harder to talk about the endemic in a way that engages and stirs. So what we hear about on TechCrunch is only a small part of the story, the milestones. But there’s so much more to tell, it seems.