Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, bloggers, YouTube, and many of the other pillars of attention online gain their strength because of tapping several major representations of curiosity online:

1. Need for Attention: seeking of action and reaction. From pokes to blog posts, odd status messages, Video posts, and profile pictures many strive to be noticed. Knowing that the social audience is compiled of friends and like-minded people, social networks are becoming THE stage for wide spread self expression and, of course, consumption of that type of friend-generated information. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have gone above and beyond in exploiting the above-mentioned need for social belonging and often enough become hosts of online social popularity contests.

2. Desire to GET: about 50% of blogs are generated and maintained for money. Our natural desire to receive free information, tips, and more has fed the blog industry to Naturally, this would not work without the pillar types of content generating strong feeds: “How to” articles, humor, gadget-reviewing content, moneymaking tips, and news or rumors related to politics, fashion, celebrities or business.

3. Wide spread social mobility and globalization: living away from family, friends, classmates, coworkers, and loved ones is one of the primary reasons people join social networks in the first place. Being able to keep in touch and follow the lives of everybody from all sides of one’s own life, encourages many initial adopters to also spread the hype around to the people they know. This phenomenon also spreads in professional life as the need for professional networking has given grounds for sites like LinkedIn and BlueChipExpert and more.

4. Sheer boredom: there is nothing like a funny site link to spring up spirits in an environment with access to the Internet. Sites like Boing Boing and YouTube thrive on boredom-driven visits. Unlike television, web sites have the ability to reference content and attract continuous attention to the same content source. Thus, a much smaller investment can often generate more significant returns than a television add. This phenomenon has lead both to the creation of Viral advertising such as Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s “Subservient Chicken” created for Burger King, and to celebrities like the Star Wars kid… who will probably never live down his minute and a half long play in front of a camera.

The major currency of curiosity is time. There is no lack of articles talking about social sites and e-mail reducing or boosting productivity at work and outside of it. The major commercial benefactors from curiosity enjoy market segmentation, exponential growth of users, and when properly done, free traffic. One way or another, all of us Internet users are apparently biologically bound to be consumers of the social evolution.

Posted by: Diana Zink on Saturday, 5th Apr, 2008