The New York Times article about Myspace is causing quite the commotion. The Social Software Weblog mentions the Tim O’Reilly post about 100,000 people making friends with the Wendy’s hamburger. If corporations are going to pony up $35k so I can put a hot dog or a Lexus on my pal list more power to Myspace, that kind of money is not going to be thrown at them for very long.
This all started back when Friendster started kicking off people who were signing up as inanimate objects. I thought it was great to be friends with the Grand Canyon and the Eiffel Tower. Who says you have to be yourself all the time on the interweb? Being someone other than yourself does not necessarily detract from the overall value of the community.
As for contextual advertising rivaling friendships on social networking sites, see my earlier post, Behavioral Targeting Beats Contextual Targeting.
Technorati Tags: hamburgler, myspace, behavioral+targeting, contextual+targeting
