MySpace as Communication Platform August 6, 2006

The vast majority of MySpace users join the site as a way of connecting with old friends and making new ones.  Then they leave the site because these connections inundate them with “too much drama.”  Go figure.

Essentially, your ability to build and maintain friendships on MySpace depends on your ability to do so in real life.  If you talk to people, they will talk to you, and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make– or something along those lines.  MySpace provides four methods of communication: comments, e-mail (“private” messages), bulletins, and message boards.

• Comments are messages that are visible to everyone who looks at your profile.  By default, they can contain HTML (allowing people to embed images, movies, sounds, or stupid things that screw up your layout), but you can change your settings to accept only plain-text comments and let you moderate the comments you receive.  Comments are limited in size.  You can receive comments while you are signed off, even if you only accept messages when you are signed on.  You can leave comments on a user’s profile or on the files that they upload (pictures, videos, blog entries, and in the case of bands, sound files), but if the user removes that file, all of the comments on it disappear.  Most users communicate almost exclusively through comments, and many measure their self-worth by the number of comments they receive each day.
• E-mail on MySpace is similar to other types of web-mail, but a little less user-friendly and considerably less secure.  Messages are typed in a text box.  You can include HTML, but you have to create the tags manually and you cannot preview the message before it is sent.  It is fairly easy to send the same message twice, or fail to send a message after several attempts, without realizing it.  Whether you quietly accept this or throw a hissy fit is up to you.
• Bulletins are a waste of time.  Nobody reads them.  Your home page has a bulletin space that shows the five most recent bulletins your friends have posted, but this disappears once your friend count reaches one thousand.  At the bottom of each bulletin is a link allowing the reader to delete the writer from the reader’s friend list, so posting bulletins is a great way to lose those few dear friends who actually take the time to read bulletins.  If you post too many bulletins in a short period of time (“bulletin spam”), you may lose the ability to post a bulletin more than once every few hours.  Bulletins can include HTML.
• Message boards can be public or “private.”  MySpace has its own extensive set of moderated message boards, and each group has its own message board that is moderated (or not) by the users who run the group.  A message board is only as fun and useful as the people who post to it, so your results will vary.

As indicated above, you can also upload various types of files for your friends (and total strangers) to see.  However, very few people will know that you’ve uploaded something new unless you tell them.

One last point: individual features of MySpace go offline even more often than the site as a whole; this applies especially to e-mail.  Your real friends won’t mind exchanging phone numbers.

Next up: crass commercialism, or, free advertising that is worth every penny.

Getting the Most Out Of MySpace August 5, 2006

So, you’ve decided to join the herd and sign yourself up for a Myspace profile.  I’m not going to congratulate you, but I’m not going to stop you either.  There are just a few things that you should know up front.

1. Myspace crashes.  A lot.  It’s primarily a traffic issue.  At last glance, there were close to two hundred million users, many with multiple profiles, and a significant percentage of these use the site every day.  Other sites find ways of dealing with this kind of traffic, but Myspace lives on a teeny little server farm in the Valley, and the server farmers are very set in their ways.  The site also has flashy ads on every page, and caters to the impatient webrat demographic– people who will call up two other pages in new windows while the first one is still loading.  Survival takes patience, a flexible schedule, and broadband.
2. Myspace is Fox.  This means very little for everyone except advertisers, but it is a deal-breaker for some people.
3. Myspace is free.  Anyone who says otherwise is trying to trick you and possibly rob you.
4. Myspace is not secure, no more than any other website, and often less so.  Keep your eyes on your address bar and your password to yourself, at the very least.
5. Tom is ubiquitous.  He will post special bulletins even when he doesn’t have anything important to say, and add himself back to your Friends List if you remove him.
6. The moderators are very busy.  They are generally willing to help you, but you have to get their attention first, and this takes a considerable amount of time and effort.

With that being said, Myspace does have some features that you may find fun and useful.  The way that you use these features depends on what you want to get out of your Myspace experience.  There are basically three ways to use Myspace:

• Communication platform
• Advertising tool
• Strategy game

The next few posts will discuss each of these uses in turn, detailing the advantages and disadvantages of using Myspace for each, with examples.

Where the time goes July 25, 2006

Toward the end of my MySpace career, I devised a simple experiment whereby I could prove to myself whether the site was a massive waste of time.  If the experiment is a success, it means that I have wasted several hours of nearly every day for a month on MySpace.  If it fails, then I wasted that same amount of time on the experiment.  Never let it be said that I lived in fear of self-defeat.

I’m still unsure as to where I stand on the intrinsic value of MySpace.  As a social networking site, it sucks: with one important exception, it has actually driven me further away from my existing friends, and given me ample reason to be wary of making new ones.  However, as an advertising tool (whether the advertised product is a good, a service, or a person), it may be the best thing available for the price.  I’m trying to decide whether, at the end of the arbitrary one-month deadline for the experiment, I should set up another MySpace just to promote this blog.  Probably not.  It’s too easy to envision myself getting addicted again and forgetting all about the blog in the process.

I’ll wait and see if it works for my friend’s band.