Near as I can tell, what you’re supposed to do on MySpace is set up your space, build your profile, and then go find friends. If you squint, it’s like you’re fixing up your bedroom, and then inviting “friends” over to your room to check it out. They can see the posters on the walls, your pics, sniff through your record collection, or watch TV (the MySpace Movies).
If you leave your page, you basically go out and look for other people, leave comments on their pages, add them as “friends,” if there’s some reason to do so. You might check out the groups. You might click a few things here and there.
But what is there to DO?
MySpace is Boring
Really. Truly. You might be using MySpace to meet up with like-minded folks, but can you issue a rallying cry and reach them all? No. You can send “bulletins,” which in my case, seem lost in a flood of other bulletins, some of them spammy stuff. Hell, even when *I* want to send spammy stuff, I know you’re not watching me on MySpace.
And what is there to DO on MySpace? I haven’t found it. I’ve yet to find something engaging that makes me go on. In fact, the only thing I ever do there is approve friend requests, answer emails, and send the occasional email.
How Flickr Works Better
There are profiles in Flickr. There are friends in Flickr. There are groups where you can contribute your work into projects. There are challenges, projects, inspirations that can travel virally along group and friend lines.
There’s PLENTY to do in Flickr.
And you can share. Flickr encourages you sending your snaps offsite (but please link back to them for reference). They make it easy to publish streams, feeds, photo buttons, and all kinds of other widgety goodness. They have an in-line mail system (which I usually think is silly, but adds to the overall sense of “sharing).
In MySpace, I clean up my room, invite you to look around at how I’ve decorated, and then its just some messages back and forth. In Flickr, I’ve got challenges, groups, new experiences, things to move it back and forth and get people motivated. There are actions. I can tag other people’s work. I can add notes to their snaps. Plenty.
And yet, MySpace is all the rage, has way more users, and captures the attention of tons of press.
Why?
I’ll leave that answer to you.
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Is it
because you aren’t an almost sixteen year old girl with lots of other sixteen year old girls friends who are doing the equivalent of hanging areound at someone’s house after school only even if the parents won’t let boys come over, that doesn’t matter?
Because you aren’t trying to reach sixteen year old girls with your song?
Because, gasp, you are too old?
Because you are trying to clean up a room, which just makes no sense for a teenager?
Just wondering
You’re not using it correctly.
On MySpace, you can send email to your friends. You can IM them. You can leave comments on each others’ photos, videos, comments, and profiles. You can share music you’ve found. You can chat in chat groups, rooms, discussion forums, etc. You can spread the word about popular bands or bands you’ve just discovered.
You can learn when your friends’ birthdays are. You can rate teachers, each other, play hot or not, share flash games (just embed in a comment), create events to meet up with friends, and more. You can also meet some amazing people on MySpace, people you’d never think possible you could meet. I’ve met people on MySpace that in real life I’d never even get past the security guards to meet.
Also, 160 million of your friends are on MySpace.
The reason MySpace seems broken to you is that you DON’T have a community on MySpace, not the way the hardcore users do. A community that’s really hardcore has all their profiles set to private - but once you get invited into one of those places, you’ll see an entirely different side of MySpace.
One other thing to consider.
MySpace does a whole bunch of things.
Video sharing is clunky compared to YouTube.
Email is unfiltered, unlike SMTP with SpamAssassin.
IM can be hit or miss.
Photo sharing is rudimentary and ugly compared to Flickr.
BUT
You can do it all on one site. Mediocre, perhaps, but it’s one stop shopping in a world that’s increasingly fragmented.
Hmm. The “all in one place” shouldn’t matter. That’s what web services are for. In an ideal world, where your photos get posted or who is on your friends list could be managed by services that talk to one another.
I’ve finally managed to expunge MySpace from my life by writing a script to pull all the comments from each profile I want to follow and deliver them as RSS.
So I come from, as you know, a particular brand of Internet Geekery that regards Myspace as a dirty dirty place from which you can get Internet STDs. It’s guys who want to get laid, girls who like the attention and put up 10 BAJILLION pix (aka camwhores), people who think they’re 2 COOL 4 U! and demonstrate this by not accepting just anyone as a friend, and tweenage girls who make their pages unbearable to visit by putting flashy pink glittery text on flashy pink glittery backgrounds.
Myspace also has a built in blog service, in addition to the other items Chris Penn mentioned above. I wanted to smack the friend of mine who used it instead of his LJ for a long time.
I use Facebook, which started as a Harvard only thing, else I doubt I would have joined, but it does seem infinitely cleaner and classier than myspace, particularly when it was students/alumni only. Less spam floats around there to this day. I actually think that not having the crazy customizeability, and the oh so very middle school “top 8 friends,” better highlights the useful functionality of a social networking site.
For me:
1. It’s online storage of all my friends’ contact info (with an internal messaging system as last resort but reliable way to get to people privately) that I never have to worry about updating myself. (this is huge).
2a. Profile comments called “the wall” which mimic the whiteboard on a college dorm door which occasionally have funny things written on them. I use walls more frequently than I ever did the physical boards.
2b. It’s got a built in “Twitter”-like function (yes with SMS integration), which is aggregated into a mini-feed for all my friends, along with with other profile updates (so and so is single now? Hmmm…).
3. Groups with personal message boards are 1/3 useful for coordination discussion, 2/3 just for having the fun group name in my profile (e.g. When I was your age, pluto was a planet)
Man it’s about time someone else agreed with me. I don’t get it either. I have some 20-something friends that are really into it, and were trying to explain it to me. Our conversation ended with them pretty much agreeing that I’m old, and just don’t get it.
I like the idea of a social network, I just think MySpace is clunky, poorly designed, and I swear every single time I login, I get some error.
I’m going to post this article to my myspace home page for all who visit to read - and understand why i haven’t responded to their comments or myspace emails. :)
MySpace is important because of Metcalf’s law. Absolutely there are hundreds of sites better designed, better coded, better in virtually every aspect save one:
They all lack the community size of MySpace.
As a Community Developer, I’d imagine your goal is to attract at least a share of that audience to your site. One of the most important things, then, is to dig into MySpace and see how to extract value out of it, because once you grok the value of it, you can make your own properties pop and sizzle.
The same thing can be said for YouTube. There are better sites and services out there but they’ve captured a large group of people and have become the THE place to be for videos. MySpace is the same way. They’ve grabbed a hold of a very large group of people and no matter if MySpace evolves or not, it will take a lot for everyone to use a different service. Another great article by Mr Brogan.
I’d also like to add that Flickr requires (seemingly at least) more effort than MySpace. To be a Flickrite of substance, you should be interested in photographing things other than yourself, at least in theory.
The Music community on MySpace though, seems like it might be more like Flickr is for Photos, and I don’t really know another place that does music like that.
HI
Try visiting me at
http://www.myspace.com/richardlazzara
and see my friends
See my online video jukebox of new wave and punk artists performing live:
http://www.myspace.com/richardjoynson
That’s what I use it for.
I can also check out any band I hear a rumour about so that I can give my opinion. Where else can you do that?
Although GNMHealth has a presence on both MySpace AND Flickr, I haven’t looked too in depth into the community aspect of Flickr.
You’ve inspired me to do that.
Well, I *was* going to log in and see if I could work out how to find you and add you as a friend, Chris, but I failed. I tried the wrong password first, and it redirected me to a page telling me I had to be logged in to use *that* feature - what, the *login* feature? You have to be logged in to be able to log in?
Once I got past that, a loud annoying tune started playing along with an animated Flash ad, and I closed the tab.
How can 150 million people be using something that’s completely unusable? I don’t get it either - must be too old.
I am a fan of both flickr AND MySpace, utilizing each for their unique strengths. May be a fluke, but at the ripe *old* age of 33, I first made acquaintance with my amazing boyfriend through MySpace — he was a friend of a friend. We wrote for months before meeting, and here we are a year later, stunned and even slightly chagrined at the odd venue which lent itself to the best relationship either of us has ever experienced. Needless to say, MySpace will perhaps always hold a top spot in my Bookmarks.