Jeremy Wright says Myspace scares the hell out of him. He lays down a few choice comparisons and points I want to riff on.
According to Wright, by the end of the year, MySpace will account for roughly 10% of all web traffic and, by the end of 2006 (if growth and acceleration curves maintain), it will account for about 40%. Mind boggling numbers.
Myspace is definitely the most prominent version of the hive mind. Myspace is accelerating faster than blogging. No doubt more posts per day, but then he compares the number of profiles to the number of blogs. Apples and oranges.
I love the idea of what happens if/when Myspace blows up. How do people reconnect? Simple, they export their data and import it into another social network. I’ll take “FOAF to the rescue” for 800. A cottage industry will grow up around Myspace.
Google and Yahoo have Adsense and Overature. Myspace will have similar SEO tools and services. There are already many companies offering ad-ins for profile pages, applications to create pages and so on.
Myspacers connect better and faster. Faster, yes. As fast as you can click “Approve” button. As for better, I disagree. It’s perceived as better because connecting with people is easy. Nobody knows a thousand people, it’s too easy to click yes or no when someone wants to connect to you.
Myspace is all about your reputation. But how do those dissed by their peers redeem themselves? When you label me a jerk, and then no one wants to connect to me, or lets me connect to them, what then? I’ve become a social outcast to thousands of people I will never know.
Jeremy goes on to ponder what will happen to Myspace from various angles.
The Myspace elite. What form will it take? My guess is purchasing power (music & clothes), social responsibility and political ramifications.
Jeremy thinks that Myspace will make blogging obsolete. Jeremy has a book out called Blog Marketing, so he knows a thing or two about it. However, I don’t buy that. I’m surprised he considers what kids write on myspace blogging. Why are you confusing personal journal entries for, ahem, professional bloggers and citizen journalism? Arguable point of course, A-list blogger vs. 16 year old girl talking about boy bands. Or 1,000 fake profiles created by music industry interns, singing the praises of the next breakout band.
No doubt, it will be fascinating to see who emerges as the A-listers of Myspace. FoxNews will bite first.
Will Myspacers self-organize themselves to preserve their culture, or will that come from outside influence? Could there be a king, a senate, or board of overseers that keeps things in check?
People expressed similar fears when Friendster’s growth was exponential. Myspace may well “jump the shark“, just like Friendster did.
As we know, Myspace was better to latch onto music and youth culture much more effectively. It has been truely amazing to watch it grow, albeit from a distance due to the fact that if you’re over 30 you’re probably on another site.
Jeremy may be scared of Myspace but advertisers are too. Major advertisers are freaking out. Schools are blocking it, as well as Facebook. Why? Because the number of assaults on women who meet men on Myspace are growing.
Myspace is the perfect blend of R-rated voyerism, and it’s free. I wonder if the porn on myspace and Flickr could start to take away from the revenues of major adult sites.
To think that Match.com had a social networking component years ago and failed to capitalize on it, what a missed opportunity.
Danah Boyd recently wrote about “Identity Production in a Networked Culture,” which talks about how teenagers are using Myspace.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m not going to argue, since it’s still a nascent thought, but:
“I love the idea of what happens if/when Myspace blows up. How do people reconnect? Simple, they export their data and import it into another social network.”
That doesn’t work if MySpace suddenly blows up. It only works if people have advance knowledge that it will.
Interesting thoughts – but two issues, 1) schools are not blocking MySpace because of assaults on women. They’re blocking it because kids spend all day on it on library computers, preventing the computers from being used for official school purposes. 2) Advertisers are not freaking out about MySpace. I’ve seen some bloggers in the advertising COMMUNITY say they are, but advertisers understand that MySpace is just taking heat in the press right now for the same issues that occur on Yahoo, MSN and AOL. I know because I work at an advertising agency. None of my clients have left MySpace.
Joe, you’re correct that the blocking occurs mostly because it’s a perceived time-waster, but there are also a number of schools blocking it for other reasons, safety being one.
In terms of advertisers, I think the issue is a lot more than “just taking heat in the press.” The myspace phenomenon and it’s resulting issues are different than say a company pulling it’s ads from Yahoo because they showed in a hate group.
As you know, the lure 50 million young people is a market that advertisers are salivating over.
When will the ads be contextually served based on profile contents? That’s when things will get interesting. Right now, impressions are high, but relevance and recall are low. This will change as advertisers figure out how to reach the kids on Myspace more effectively.
To your point, it depends on the brand that is being advertised. Who are your clients?
EveryonesSpace.com is better.
My company, Affinity Engines, makes a social networking product called inCircle. We’ve taken a private label, authenticated approach rather than a public, anyone can sign up and pretend to be whoever they want approach. We work directly with membership organizations, mainly university alumni communities, to authenticate each user. Users are still able to post and share content in an uncensored environment, but they can’t do things annonymously and everything is within the trusted context of their exclusive alumni/membership community. The result is a mix between Linkedin and Facebook where each site is branded to the University/organization and each user is individually authenticated. Our first inCircle community was Stanford University, launched in 2002, one of the originators of the social networking boom. This is a much lower profile approach but it’s gathering a lot of steam as concerns with open sites, like the ones outlined above, are becoming more apparent.