The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
How much time do you spend online? Whatever your number is, you can almost guarantee that the average teenager spends more. Not only teenagers, but the number of hours spent online by tweens, kids between the ages of about 10 and 12, is rapidly climbing. These are kids who have grown up with Internet connections and will probably never know a life without being connected. Many companies are beginning to aim their products at kids these ages and at the hours they spend online. No entity has been hotter and doing more to change the online landscape than an old favourite: Barbie. Often reviled and lately outsold by other brands, Barbie is looking to recapture the market by modernizing and moving to where the kids are: the Internet. While dolls remain the main product line, Barbie has also been releasing movies and this summer has moved into MP3 players as well. But the biggest move has come with the creation of an online, fully 3D immersive space called Barbie World. While officially still in beta form, the world has been signing up over 50,000 new members each day for several months now, giving the company over three million users in 60 days and rapidly climbing. Second Life, the virtual world by which all others are compared, took three years to get one million users. A the current rate of growth, Barbie World should pass not only Second Life, but also World of Warcraft, the largest commonly used online space in North America, sometime this fall. Barbie World allows girls to design a character, build a house for them, buy furniture and supplies and, of course, interact with other people all in this one space. There are common areas where the kids who are online can visit others who are online, go shopping, dancing, or just go for a walk. While obviously aimed at teen girls and below, this space represents a real opportunity for this company to change its image and really change what the Internet looks like. Girls have always been a minority online. When first launched, the Internet was far more heavily weighted toward males than females. But over the past few years, that has been changing. Many girls are much more interested in using the Internet as a space to connect with friends and communicate. Chatting, instant messaging, and sharing pictures with friends are some of the ways girls have moved online. While younger boys play shooting games online, girls generally are much more casual gamers who work together to solve problems. Which is how companies like Barbie and Nintendo, with its DS Lites and a host of new games, are capitalizing on this audience. These girls are a movement, a new generation, who will have been brought up online. Fast forward 10 or 15 years into the future and you will find a complete generation of girls who have always been online working in collaborative spaces, and who take international communication as something that simply happens. Barbie has the chance to reshape a generation of girls and change their relationship with technology. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
