Social Media Now: Stumbling Upon Social Shopping, Teen Identity Management

StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp spent yesterday afternoon denying rumors that StumbleUpon had agreed to an acquisition by eBay.

If that purchase, or one by any of StumbleUpon’s other rumored suitors, goes through its implications for social search will have been predigested. It’s funny and fascinating, seeing out pundits reacted to the reported price of $40 to $45 million.

Valleywag sees the price as evidence that the social news sector’s financial value does not live up to the hype:

The rumored purchase price, of some $40m, will provide the Stumble Upon’s founders and angel investors with an excellent return, because there was no venture capital round; but the deal values the Digg audience only in the $100m-$150m range, and the entire sector below $500m. A revolution in news, maybe, but with more losers than winners.

(I think Valleywag is making a mistake to classify StumbleUpon as social news, but that just highlights the slippery quality of definitions in the world of social media.) 

Dylan Tweney at Wired News had the opposite reaction:

$40 million seems like a lot to pay for a company that has just 2.2 million users — users who have done nothing more than download and install a browser toolbar. $20 per user? It just doesn’t make sense.

Andrew Parker had a more in depth analysis of the reported valuation and its implications for the social media industry comparing StumbleUpon’s price of $21 per user to the acquisition prices of Flickr, MySpace and Skype. According to Parker’s analysis StumbleUpon’s per-user price per user is in range with MySpace’s in 2005.

The Net was also abuzz with speculation over what eBay plans to do with StumbleUpon–a toolbar utility that allows users to rate websites and videos, then enables a sort of query-free social search, directing users to sites according how closely other users rating match a surfer’s own. Om Malik sees the acquisition as more of a technology purchase, giving eBay a new technology to attach to Skype in an effort to create a  backdoor desktop.

I think Muhammad Saleem gets closer to the likely reasoning: social shopping. Saleem quotes a fall 2006  report from American Marketers Association:

…47% of consumers said that they would be open to using social networks (such as MySpace, Orkut, Facebook) to find and discuss holiday gift ideas. Furthermore, 51% of them said that they would look for discounts [on] social networking sites, 51% said that they would download coupons form theses sites, and another 18% said that they would participate on such sites by (reading or) writing product reviews. Most interestingly though, 29% said that they would actually make purchases through these sites.

Social shopping is the slumbering giant of the social media industry. Going shopping together, buying because of word of mouth recommendations, trying on a pair of pants and asking a friend: “do these make me look fat?” are endemic offline shopping behaviors that should translate into online behavior with almost no effort.

So far this hasn’t been the case. Online store fronts have been slow to add social functioning beyond Web 1.0, discussion board-style user ratings. Social networks have been slow to add commerce (although there is some indication that users are more likely to purchase from sites that are specifically devoted to commerce than from general social sites, social networks could certainly launch stores). And social shopping start ups like Kaboodle, ThisNext and ShopWiki have yet to reach notable consumer scale.

While rumors of the eBay acquisition of StumbleUpon made the rounds, Google–a reported StumbleUpon suitor–launched something that looks a little bit like a competitor–a toolbar refinement of Google’s “feeling lucky” feature that will direct users to new sites based on that user’s prior searches. That sounds ok. It has the benefit of requiring less data entry than StumbleUpon, but it also has the disadvantage of being search based. People use search so broadly and so frequently that I can’t imagine search based serendipity being possesses anything close to the signal-to-noise ratio of ratings based serendipity.

Teen Privacy and Social Networking: A fascinating study out this morning from the Pew Internet & American Life Project looks at attitudes toward privacy and identity management among teens who use online social networking. Pew is selling as the top line of it’s story the notion teens don’t share personal information indiscriminately, but apply various screens–allowing only friends to view certain information for example to keep things from their parents and others.

It’s a duh kind of finding that fails to plumb more important depths because even the narrower circle of friend who are able to see the personal information can be quite large and the information shared can be quite personal (imagine sharing private information not with six friends but with your entire high school).

I found more surprising the finding that 45% of online teens DON’T have profiles on social networks. And of the teens who do have online profiles one-third don’t restrict access to their profiles in any way.

The most interesting parts of the survey delve into the way teens manipulate their online identities and why. Older teens share more personal information than younger teens. Boys lie about their identities online more than do girls. And predictably girls are more wary than boys about identifying their physical location.

At its core the survey shows that teens are very sophisticated about identity management:

For most teens, decisions about privacy and disclosure depend on the nature of the encounter and their own personal circumstances. Teen decisions about whether to disclose or not involve questions like these: Do you live in a small town or big city? How did you create your network of online ‘friends’? How old are you? Are you male or female? Do you parents have lots of rules about Internet use? Do your parents view your profile?

The Net savvy and privacy sophistication of kids doesn’t surprise me. Back in the mid 1990s I covered for The New York Times the social trend of teen girls using the Internet to form online clubs in an era long before social networking tools make it easy. Even then the 13 and 14 year olds I contacted were incredibly careful, smart and probing about contact from strangers and displayed a more advanced understanding of online identity safety than did their parents.

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