Just noticed this article was a year old >.>… Thought it was THIS year. Shit. Well, I suck.

I really don’t completely understand why people feel like it’s worth writing about.. Or worth paying much thought to at all, for that matter.

I do use myspace though, and I’ve tried Facebook but just don’t like it.

Most of the things that the writer bitched about in this article are completely avoidable. If you don’t like the way certain parts of somebody’s profile loads (extra codes, automatic music, ect) you are very welcome to going into your preferences and disabling all that.

And yeah, a feisty 13 year old can add a lot of stupid looking shit to a profile on Myspace.. And they can make quite an eye sore, no doubt about that.. But so? Most people with a shred of sense aren’t going to make their profile look like shit >.>’. And if having people possibly making eyesores is the cost for also having people who can create a very organized and original profile layout, then so be it. As aforementioned, one can always edit what they do and don’t see on a profile (these controls are getting pretty flexible, too. I have to say I’m surprised).

Finally, I don’t think you’ll see Myspace die anytime soon.. In fact, I would expect Facebook to take the fall first. I say this simply because the foundation myspace has laid out for so many up and coming artists of all sorts! It’s a very welcoming community to many different activities. Nobody will argue that Myspace DOESN’T have a pretty kickass music set up, and the video setup seems to be coming along well too. Facebook lacks these things. Facebook essentially remains the simple profile that people use for shits and giggles. ANNDDD, Facebook’s audience has been getting younger and younger overtime as well. Eventually those 13-14 year old kids are gonna get tired of their shit, and they’ll find the next popular internet trend, if you will.. But Myspace will still be going strong as it cadres to a much more consistent and reliable community overall.

@Starhawk: Oh, hey – I forgot. I haven’t logged into myspace for a while. Ok, I hereby amend my post to include the fact I know of one person who uses MySpace over Facebook. :)

Still, most people I knew IRL and who were die-hard MySpace users and who scoffed at Facebook recently jumped ship. On after the other. I found that indicative of an impending failure of the service.

Hmm ya know I have a myspace page Luke, lol. I don’t think itis dead either tho i do know people that have left it for facebook. Dying maybe, dunno? Anyway It is a good place for new or old bands and I kinda like it mostly for the people i have meet there, and btw i don’t hink my profile is too much of a mess … at least by myspace standards, lol.

And btw sorry about using windows and er OMG IE, I am not at home, lol. peace

I keep a myspace page, but it hasn’t been updated in ages, and I never log on. It’s primary purpose was to keep track of people I knew when I moved across the country, and I do that almost entierly by RSS feeds of their myspace blogs. I gave up telling people who I would think had more sense that the “pimped” profiles gave me a headache and slowed down my machine more than I was willing to accept to keep track of them. Not that I feel facebook is any better, and it’s getting worse as it grows in popularity.

@Ido: True, they still have the music thing. But I wonder if they can survive as a music platform if they are no longer a viable social network.

@Travis McCrea: True, but I noticed that this is a linear progression. When people first learn about computers they go “ZOMG! Look, I put my pictur on my desktop!” At that stage they create tacky, horrible looking MySpace designs because they can. Eventually they will gravitate towards something that at least has a good color composition.

But that’s not the point. I was not blaming people for their crappy pages. That’s what people do – you are right. Perhaps enabling them to do this can be considered a feature.

But MySpace did it backwards. Instead of designing a profile editor that would allow people to change colors, use background images and reposition page elements, they allowed them to inject CSS into their profile. So as cliche as it sounds, they took a known bug, and re-branded it as a feature.

Please keep in mind that I love aesthetics:

At work, I was looking around at this ass ugly desktop backgrounds some people would use, that clashed with the color scheme of windows (admittedly not much to work with) XP. They had poorly lit pictures of them and their friends as their desktop that looked like it was taken from a mobile phone and boosted to 800 X 600 (and they were using 800 X 600 resolution).

The desktops make me sick, I don’t know how they can possibly function like that… For contrast here are my bgs for my iPhone and Ubuntu

http://www.travismccrea.com/images/IMG_0010.PNG

http://www.travismccrea.com/images/ubuntu22jan2009.png

but then I realised a nice looking background a usable interface isn’t what entertains them… Its the smile they get on their face when they minimize outlook and it takes them 10 minutes to find where IE is on their desktop while they also get too look at that crappy picture that makes it worth it to them…

Just like on myspace, they WANT to hear what their friends are listening to, and don’t want to bother pressing a play button… thats not wrong… its just different. We look for code standards because thats what we do all day… they don’t care about our standards, XHTML means NOTHING, hell they don’t even know what that is… they don’t even know what CSS is… they just know that they copy and paste words to their myspace and it works!

Some even venture to find how to change colors and images.

Once again… its not that they are doing it wrong… they are just not following the same web standards that the rest of us hold…

MySpace isn’t dead, it’s just not a social network anymore, it’s a platform for new and existing music artists.

MySpace is the place to go if you want to hear music. Today, almost every artist I know of has a MySpace account.

If I hear of a new band and I want to see if I like them enough to go to a concert, I’ll go to their MySpace account. and If I want to introduce a new artist to a friend of mine, I’ll send him to the artist’s MySpace account. If I want to know when an artist is performing in my city, I’ll go to MySpace.

And MySpace is taking action in that direction, they started a new music service, selling DRM-free songs and I think that they are also selling songs of artists which are not part of a record company, on a rev-share basis (couldn’t find reference for the rev-share part, but I remember reading it somewhere)

Mhm, agreed with. Being a university student, I’ve never seen anything like this, only Facebook as a gossip tool. I guess the spectrum goes both ways.

@Mack: I don’t necessarily agree with that. I’ve seen real people use it for very social purposes. A lot of people use it to schedule social events. This can be done via the built in even app, allowing people to RSVP or in an ad hoc manner using status messages.

For example someone posts something like “ultimate Frisbee, the quad, noon today”. Someone responds to that, other people re-post that message and next thing you know you have like 60 people in the quad at noon. This is actually an emergent behavior that some of my students have discussed when they did a presentation on Facebook. I didn’t realize it worked like that but apparently it does.

It is also great for sharing pictures. For example when my brother organized an end of semester party, people collaboratively uploaded and tagged over a hundred pictures (from several different cameras) of that event.

So yeah, I’ve seen Facebook enhance rather than replace or hinder social interactions at least in a college campus setting.

I do get what you mean – that whole “online social networking hinders real social networking” idea is very common and very prevalent. But I now believe it is largely false based on my observations on how college students use this tool.