Who here has heard of Myspace.com? Not many, I’d wager, unless my readership has suddenly become comprised of teenagers.
Do you remember when LiveJournal was considered the blogging tool of little or no consequence, mainly because it was stuffed to the gills with teenagers spouting pointless nonsense about nothing in particular (unlike ‘proper’ bloggers or course)? What nobody bothered to notice was that LJ is a shockingly keen piece of kit that, while it looked a little rough, worked really well at what it was designed to do. Nobody disses LJ like they used to and most bloggers have an LJ on the side, even if they don’t tell their ‘normal’ blog readers about it (and no, I’m not saying).
Myspace looks to be LJ on a shit-load of steroids and speed. It first came on my radar via my referrer logs where someone had hotlinked to an amusing image on my server which I normally don’t mind but it was being access a lot. Following the link took me to a page somewhat like this, which was all rather scary to say the least.
So far, so easy to dismiss, but what’s interesting about Myspace is that it’s huge yet no-one who claims to have their finger on the pulse of what’s going on is saying anything about it. Probably because it looks really shit and is full of moronic teenagers. That said, musicians are taking note. Myspace appears to gear itself around music as a social networking tool, which partly explains how it’s grown so fast with teenagers, and offers bands their own ‘myspace’ to promote themselves. And by all accounts it really works for them.
If this Myspace thingy really is the future then I reckon I need to be part of it. I’m not going to miss the boat due to snobbishness like I did with LJ. I’m going to get right in there and hang with the kids. Here is my Myspace space, set up this evening. I already have one friend, Tom, who was assigned to me by Myspace in a kind of buddying system so I don’t feel left out at the party, which is nice of them. Since 21,199,314 people are friends with Tom it means my “extended network” is huge so I may well have to ditch him soon, but right now it’s good to have a friend, no matter how insincere.
For I’m about to embark on an experiment. I’m going to take Myspace seriously and see what happens, and I shall report my findings here.
Wish me luck…
But… LiveJournal still is packed to the gills with teenagers spouting pointless nonsense about nothing in particular. (Not that Blog*Spot isn’t, of course.)
I had to view source to follow your “like this” link — you’re missing an r in your href — but: Oh. My. God.
“Pete has 1 friends”.
I’ve looked at myspace a few times, mainly because, as you say, bands seem to be using it as a way to spread the word and encourage communities.
But I’ve never got around to actually signing up because I’m signed up for too many of these things already. There just aren’t enough hours in the day !
so why is LiveJournal so popular? I just find it too limiting for what I want. What interests me are the number of geeks who are on it!
It’s something I’ve heard of but not got round to looking at really. I’ve got my LJ and I don’t really feel the need to explore any other systems – I don’t use the one I’ve got often enough! Still, if you find anything interesting while hanging out there, let me know!
James / bdb: What works about LJ is the community aspect of it. beyond the obvious and annoying “I friend you!” stuff it’s very easy to develop communities and the like that fuction well for as long as needed, but maintains a sense of intimacy at the same time. In short, it scales well.
Yes, too limiting for my general needs, but for someone who just wants to write and meet like minded folk – perfect.
Hmm, now I’m curious about LiveJournal, having passed on it several times for not being clever enough.
I’m sure I have a MySpace account, but similarly, haven’t felt it’s worth the effort. There are dozens or hundreds of these social networking sites out there, quite a few of which are profiled lightly over at Social Software Weblog.
I reckon most of them will only ever capture a few people, but there are some interesting attempts.
Oh, the other thing about LJ is it’s technically very clean – an open source project that’s based around RSS/XML so you can get feeds out of it, syndicate stuff into it, etc.
dglp: I’ve always been very skeptical of social networking sites – they always seemed utterly pointless unless you put some value on collecting an unmanageable number of “friends”. What interests me about Myspace is it looks to be really crap and doesn’t follow web standards or any of the “rules” of web-apps but is really popular with “da kidz” (20 million profiles aparently). I can’t quite see how it works but I’m going to find out.
was somewhat reluctantly shanghai’d into the myspace universe, by, coincidentally, band stuff, & if you avoid the endless breast shots & giggles it’s actually worthwhile, esp. for finding people you almost forgot you knew.
livejournal, on the other hand, is completely over my head.