Slashdot Mirror
MySpace #1 US Destination Last Week
An anonymous reader writes "Hitwise is reporting that MySpace has reached the top, surpassing Yahoo! Mail as the most visited site on the internet for US users. Seeing a 4300% increase in visits in just two short years, this internet sensation has come quite a long ways. From the article: 'To put MySpace's growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com represented 1.9% of all Internet visits. With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits.'"
And boy is that depressing
Good Lord, another myspace mashup ;)
In completely unrelated news, Yahoo! has announced that starting next month users of their free Yahoo! Mail service will have a new feature: pictures of scantly-clad 16 year-olds on their mail home page.
Myspace is the most pointless, horribly designed site on the internet.
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0008/satire-fbiteen s.shtml
Why didn't they take the epoch when the site started, so they'd go up by +inf%?
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
How can we learn from this to make our sites better. Can we translate this type of activity to the 30+ crowd instead of just the teens?
that myspace.com is now offically the new sewer of the internet?
the downhill trend of quality of life continues
Al Gore would be turning in his grave if he wasn't a robotic zombie incapable of death, charged to guard the internet for all time.
Consider...
Today, we have online dating, message boards for everything, and web based chat everywhere. If a site isn't dynamic, it's quickly dropped by the online populace. The fact is, this is not unexpected. Myspace.com spent some time developing a site where people could blog and network. It worked for them.
The worrisome part of this is that people don't seem to understand how potentially dangerous this is. Consider the sheer volume of details some people (read: children) put on their myspace accounts. Parents SHOULD police this, but, all too often, they don't. The fact is that this service presents all too much possibility for children to get hurt. Consider also the single women all over who post their info online. Some of them realize that they shouldn't post that they live alone in an apartment in south-central LA, but others would very quickly post this sort of thing. Unfortunately, this again puts people at risk.
I don't think that the site should be stopped from operating, as I tend to be somewhat of the opinion that if you put your details out there for the world to see, it's your fault if something bad happens. OTOH, people need to think a bit more.
That emo kids are rapidly taking over the country!
How do you obtain their numbers? Are they using DNS? Are they putting sniffers on all the core routers? Is this even possible to any degree of accuracy? It seems this junk science is probably about as reliable as Neilsen ratings...
it's impressive that's it's now number one
but it also shows how vain and petty america is
They picked the easiest market to sway, young adults. In addtion, lots of disposable income(advertisement goldmine!). Not withstanding its use (the website) as a hook-up for hookups.
Combining lots of barely post pubescent teens with raging hormones and disposable income contributes to this large growth. The website scaled and spread by word of mouth. This site is the best representation of a "free internet" as far as I can tell. Everyone who wants to be on it, can be on it. This includes the spectrum of bands looking for fans with a pro website, to teens looking for a connection, including the text choice of size 55 pink wingdings on a blinking blue background or whatever.
The site has support from everyone, the users, the advertisers, the creators, the owners. Everyone is getting something they want from it. This is how a business grows so rapidly.
To quote(paraphrase) someone, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."
We hit NO. 1 peeps, this EEE the SHEET Yo, just ballin'
:kisses:
THES IS out the ass omg OMG I am speechless
LOng live EMO! peace and love to all. and BOOBIES!
yours,
xxxzzzMYsPACErUlEsmEyyyyzzzxxx
I may be alone in this, but I find MySpace for the most part intensely narcissistic and inane.
People are presented with a tool for publishing absolutely anything, about any topic they choose. Instead of presenting thoughtful, creative or otherwise valuable content, the vast majority elect to pointlessly ramble about themselves in minute detail or engage in endless back and forth with other users about nothing in particular. Which is fine, but it shouldn't have the legitimacy of other web content.
In many ways, the whole blog concept has perhaps lowered the barrier to entry for on-line publishing a little *too* far. When anyone can publish anything you want with virtually no effort, then it no longer requires that you be inspired or motivated before your inane ramblings are out there in cyberspace. The media has adopted the trend too, with 'blog' in the context of a news site all too often meaning 'poorly researched and largely content-free "reporting" on sensationalist subject matter.'
Perhaps it's time to move past the blog hype and to consider some method for differentiating personal diaries (i.e., what used to be a personal homepage), social chit chat (i.e., what used to be a bulletin board, IRC, or IM activity), and publications with actual content. Right now the net is awash with an ever-expanding tide of rubbish and there is very little to assist in finding the few really interesting and high quality publications amongst the garbage.
Ultimately it's depressing that, given the ability to communicate our ideas to anyone on earth, most of us can't come up with anything better than pictures of ourselves drinking too much and mass-produced but ineffectual rebelliousness.
Read Pynchon.
I find this difficult to believe. I would think that google would have more visits than myspace, for sure.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
Project Name: "A Life"
Project Goal: Obtain "A Life" and do something with it once obtained.
Probability of success:
(World Population - Number of people on MySpace) / World Population
Berserk Manga > All
researchers determined that at least 4.5% of all US Internet visits are extraneous, and terminated them in order to conserve energy.
I didn't realized that pedophiles and their victims make up such a significant portion of the Internet population. I kid, I kid.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
You seem to be producing what is known as Word Salad. This is possible symptom of schizophrenia.
I wish you well friend.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
Myspace is driven and pushed by "old media", not "new media". It is old media's way of saying, well if people must bypass our traditional control over information and content for the internet - let's try to make it our internet and not someone elses. For example, their obsession with "child predators" as of late probably has little to do with protecting children and everything to do with making sure that their system is fenced off from "that big nasty mean world out there". No, not the nasty world of child abusers, but the nasty world that breaks their distribution monopoly on information, news, and content.
They are the "bread and circuses" of the information age. Feed em crap, keep em happy, and most of all keep their eyes and ears distracted from political and financial issues of the real world. Like them or hate them, you gotta admit theyre doing a hell of a job at pushing the hype. IMHO, it is truely amazing.
It seems to me that myspace is wildly popular, and that it is also the target of a whole lot of criticism from people who actually know how to use the internet.
The general anti myspace rhetoric is usually, "we can already have our own web pages", which labels myspace as a somewhat redundant service with advertisements.
What I rarely see about myspace, is what a brilliant idea it is. Not everyone knows how to create a website, but most people have the capacity, and interest to learn how to use myspace. Instead of looking down on myspacers perhaps those of us who know how to use the internet should learn how to cater to those who are not technically savvy. Isn't that the idea of selling technology? Making things that normally wouldn't be accessible to everyone accessible?
Of course, whenever one of my friends asks me if I have created a myspace page yet, I always reply by calling them a worthless tool. Weird eh?
You take it, I don't want it...
Alexa says that the top five sites today are, in order, Yahoo, MSN, Google, Myspace, and eBay. Of those, only Myspace is owned by an "old media" company, and only Myspace is growing significantly. This may be the first time that a top Internet site was owned by an "old media" company. (Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation). It makes sense; Myspace is to the Internet as tabloid journalism is to the newspaper industry. News Corp now has a leading position in both.
...and Orkut is still nr 1 in Brasil, is there any alternative website that you can recommend?
Can we translate this type of activity to the 30+ crowd instead of just the teens?
At the rate that teens and 20-somethings are being dumbed down by visiting MySpace pages, the 30+ crowd that they will become will have lost any ability to grow out of using it.
1) Get a 16-year-old using MySpace
2) Wait 14 years - thus, 30-year-old still using MySpace
3) Profit!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Just makes me wonder if slashdot is somehow responsible for a slight jump... after all they did just run a story about opendns and how it makes myspace faster. Myself like many others I am sure wanted to see if this was true, so I tried it out...didn't seem any quicker I also tried it out through several other dns servers, They all faired on average about the same depending on the time of day. Just in my testing I probably generated 75-100 hits... gotta be thorough. Disclaimer: I have never visited the myspace site before this.. and probably never will again. Well unless slashdot runs another article mentioning it...
FragHARD or don't frag at all
That's why my series of tubes are blocked, and it takes up to four days to get my internets down onto my windows!
I sure hope that my truck full of internets arrives soon...
kill elrond
take elrond
put elrond in cupboard
See telcos? If you really want to make money, just support and lobby for a complete net neutrality bill which has a clause excluding Myspace.com from neutrality! Then you'll be rich, and we'll have net neutrality(ish)!
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
And now, a startup is the #1 site (or even if you question the numbers, pretty obviously in the top five) and there is nothing Microsoft has to show.
Sure, you can say Microsoft makes its money in other places, they're an OS/app company, etc. but they sure spend a lot of money on MSN, trying to get more Internet eyeballs. To me, an outside observer, it just seems that they are eternally reactionary and a couple years behind, despite having practically unlimited resources. What an indictment.
Advice: on VPS providers
90% of the replies to this story will amount to "I believe I'm too cool for MySpace."
I think you all aren't going to like this, but Myspace is beginning to become what people (under 30) mean when people ask if you are "on the internet?" This is similar to when people ask if you have a phone, they mean a cell phone.
I saw a movie preview yesterday on tv where it didn't list a website, but a myspace address. It may be a good thing that your content provider will become a social networking site, so you could look at your content in virtually the same way on every computer which is connected.
But doing the same thing the same way as everyone else isn't what being a nerd is all about, right?
purely out of curiosity a year and change ago. since it started booming i use it to post garbage on myspace sites for random ppl who make me their friend. i do it when i am bored with reading online or doing anything productive. it's kinda cathartic.
No sig for you!!
Of couse, because its massively popular, and its also the worlds most gruesome 24/7 car crash. A substantial portion of that traffic has to be from the 'how bad can it get' voyeristic traffic.
That said, there are a number of top folks in lots of musical/artistic/etc displinines who realize that its a decent way to provide a forum for their fans. (For me, its the number of top flight DMC DJs and Ninja Tunes artists who offer free videos and music across the site.) I wonder if that will stop if it becomes too popular and too noise-to-signal.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Personally I am sick of Slashdot using every pretense just to put the word Myspace on the main page.
Myspace and security violations, Myspace and college kids denied internships, Myspace and whatever.
Slashdot, get yourself advertising clients that are more in tune with your readership because you're
alienating it bigtime. Most of us are no longer in college and don't put up nude pictures of ourselves
captioned 'Man that pot was awesome but I was too stoned to wank myself'.
So let's see, how's this for an ad? If you want to network with people to do business with then I suggest
you go to http://www.openbc.com/ (open business contacts). It's some of what Myspace may be contemplating of
becoming for the 30+ crowd but fuck them. They're too late in the game for that.
Oh and here is a listing of Myspace dross since last May: (there's more but let's leave it at that)
MySpace #1 US Destination Last Week
On July 12th, 2006 with 39 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Hitwise is reporting that MySpace has reached the top, surpassing Yahoo! Mail as the most visited site on the internet for US...
Main The Internet, News
Score: 8.3
Adware Spreads Through Myspace
On July 10th, 2006 with 201 comments
Sandbagger writes "Here's an interesting problem for MySpace -- groups of websites that entice MySpace users into placing videos onto their profile pages...
IT Spam, Security, The Internet, IT
Score: 7.4
New(?) Anti-Fraud DNS service
On July 10th, 2006 with 184 comments
knownsense writes "A new DNS system to foil spammers, abusers, and other ills of the Internet is around the corner, reports Wired. It claims to be more...
IT Networking, The Internet, IT
Score: 2.2
The Man Behind MySpace
On July 4th, 2006 with 186 comments
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian has an article looking at the life of Chris DeWolfe, a co-founder of the popular MySpace community site. The article...
Main The Internet
Score: 6.1
The Information Revolution
On July 3rd, 2006 with 36 comments
Aeonite writes "The Information Revolution subtitled, The Not-For-Dummies Guide to the History, Technology and Use of the World Wide Web, is the second in a...
Book Reviews Book Reviews
Score: 0.6
Congress May Add Record Requirements to MySpace
On June 30th, 2006 with 343 comments
An anonymous reader writes "CNet is reporting that Congress may be working to extend the record retention requirements they're already working on for ISPs to...
Your Rights Online United States, The Internet, Politics, Your Rights Online
Score: 7.0
Summer Camps Join Fray Against MySpace
On June 23rd, 2006 with 251 comments
The New York Times reports that now even summer camps are raising concerns about social networking sites such as MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook. Camps are...
Your Rights Online The Internet, Your Rights Online
Score: 5.9
Teen Sues MySpace Over Sexual Assault
On June 20th, 2006 with 979 comments
kaufmanmoore writes "A 14-year old is suing myspace for $30 million claiming the site failed to protect her from a 19-year old she met through the site. The...
Your Rights Online The Courts, The Internet
Score: 8.0
A New Search for MySpace
On June 16th, 2006 with 146 comments
garzpacho writes "Businessweek is reporting on MySpace's new strategy. They're going to pit the large engines against each other in a bidding war to provide...
Main Businesses, The Internet
Score: 7.0
More Warnings Against Oversharing on MySpace
On June 11th, 2006 with 383 comments
Skapare writes "Your next prospective employer might be watching your MySpace page, according to a story at the New York Times. And if you think Facebook is...
Main Businesses, The Internet
Score: 5.9
Why Web 2.0 Will End Your Privacy
On June 5th, 2006 with 233 comments
An anonymous reader writes "This is a pretty good insight into some of the dangers of social networking and websi
I received 55 friend requests today none of them from real people. (Well I haven't looked at all of them, but the few I clicked on were from profiles that identified them selves as 18-22 single female, and all had lots of male "friends" they all more or less looked like ads for dating services, promos for bands, etc.)
It is kind of interesting that myspace seems to hold up under all the spam, even though they don't seem to do much about it (or are at least losing the war badly)
Hmm, time to go check out freshmeat for a myspace invite script.
Work bio at MMWD
Most people think MySpace is pretty stupid and a waste of time yet they still have a myspace page. Why? Because it's a place to "hook up". In the end MySpace is just another avenue for sex. And that's why it's number one.
The "single women all over who post their info online" are 45-year-old fat males.
The "children" are FBI agents.
I'm totally gonna go emo!
Do you really think that myspace has to advertise?
/. is running these stories because they're in the news; for better or worse, myspace is part of the internet culture, and this is one place where it can be discussed outside of itself.
On Slashdot? Or anywhere?
C'mon. Get real. Perhaps
Anything that facilitates consenting individuals getting together is bound to be a success.
When I first started messing around on the internet 10+ years ago, I used my first name for a couple things. Very quickly I caught on that this wasn't such a great idea, but what I didn't count on is lifelong archival and the rising power of search engines. You see, my first name and last name are rare to the point that I highly doubt anyone else in America has them both. Not completely weird or a made up word, it's just rather uncommon to encounter either one individually, and that makes the combination unique.
So anyway, you need only type my name into Google and have a complete record of every inane thing I ever said back when I was 15 years old. If there is anyone else in the world with the same name, they haven't ever used it on the net. Ok, so it's not particularly damaging information, but it does allow ANYONE to find out that I like Nirvana and Douglas Adams and RPGs and arguing with people. It's rather embarassing, really, to have your semi-profound adolescent musings completely exposed, availible for anyone to read at any time so long as they know your first and last name, but there's really nothing I can do about it. The original archives have been cached by Google and archive.org. Like it or not, I'm immortalized, and I really pity the fools on Myspace who have unique names, or even the ones with common names but specific addresses (or other identifying personal info) posted. In all liklihood every single trivial fact, every single inane/insane rant has been archived *somewhere* and it'll eventually turn up in a Google search. It's irreversable--it's a gigantic bell that simply can't be un-rung.
I shudder to think what would've happened if I made a truly questionable post under my real name. If some teen posts a rant on Myspace that could be construed as racist or radically anarchist or in any other way offensive or unpopular, that rant will be there perhaps for the rest of his life. It will be there every time he goes to apply for a job, and if he was foolish enough to provide such information as a home address he won't be able to claim it's not him. I don't know what there's any real solution for this except education. A lot of people out there don't see the point in anonymity, or even worse they view it as a weakness, a sign of guilt or triviality. Unfortunately, likely they won't start paying attention until criminals and potential employers/friends/lovers alike start turning to Google every time they get curious about their mark/employee/friend/etc.
Most of what you said applies to the comments on this site. Different target audience, same inane narcissism.
- illuminaut, arbiter elegantiarum.
.. before they take over the Internet.
...
I guess I hereby welcome our dark web2.0 lords in our vicinity
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I speak to the person who runs their (myspace) ad servers, every week. He tells me that they average 3.7 billion page views per day. They run a custom version of the Doublick 5 ad servers, almost 400 of these servers. But they have a issue of how to monetize this traffic. They are trying to find ways to do that. They have a lot of junk ad inventory. I hear that they are getting very much into the mobile space in the US and internationally - video blogging, photo blogging etc. This way they can make atleast two dollars per user month over mobile services. On another note, Micrososft is working with them very closely to convert their server farm from Cold Fusion to ASP.Net 2.0.
That's a rhetorical question, by the way. It's one thing for Google Toolbar or Alexa Toolbar users to transmit that kind of information to be aggregated. Hell, those users get PageRank and TrafficRank in return. But when you ISP snoops on you and sends URLs from HTTP headers to a marketing company, it seems like someone's privacy is being violated. Plus, self-selected contributors are one thing. But self-selected selectors are a completely different beast. I wouldn't put credence in their statistics or their ethics.
I kind of wish the internet was still limited to the nerds in some way - not that it's less free for everyone to use - it's just that if you want to put something on the internet you would have to seek out a nerd facilitator... Anyway, yes, most of the internet is now rubbish. Thankfully search engines do a decent job of sorting through this rubbish, but as the rubbish becomes more important than real information that might change. That is, a retarded blog page linked to from tons of spots might rise to the top of a google search, as oppoed to a reasonable, informative resource. I suppose it might be possible to start again - offer something like the internet yet make it better. I've always wanted a better markup language than html. Screw xml in general - create a new semantic markup language and presentation system. I know that this doesn't actually have much to do with a new internet, however if you're going to have a new network, might as well use a new format as the standard. If people have access to this new network, the browsers will be provided as well. The network could be cobbled together through wireless repeaters, at first a neighborhood of access, eventually a city, etc. Wires between wireless bits could provide fast interconnect between locations. Routing around would likely require complex pathfinding, but after a path is visited it could be optimized. Repeaters could learn where to send packets for fastest delivery. Bridges between the new and the old would also need to be constructed, yet metadata, tagging, commenting, rating, moderating could all be built in. Most of all with this system is that you wouldn't need fancy dancy servers to produce popular content. The repeaters would have hefty hard drives and work somewhat like bittorrent, extept that everyone actually seeds. All the kludges of the current internet could be alleviated. Maybe its a crackpot idea, I haven't thought it out throughly. Mod parent up!
It's so emotional that it's worthy of a blog entry! Have you considered opening a myspace account? :P
MySpace gets lots of visits because half of the visitors are returning several times an hour because the crapload of ads and layers of WMP's on autoplay crash their browser repeatedly.
.Mac - their business is not motivated by advertising placement:
A F-44DF-A3BA-7FE0D9D77A19.html
Seriously, if you try to use MySpace on a Mac, you'll be luck to get three pages deep (not counting intersititals) before your browser gives up.
MySpace better milk it while they got it, because running their site like that means it isn't going to be popular long. The teen market is notoriously fickle and they have shorter attention spans than the rest of us.
Don't think other companies are going to ignore the youth networking market either. Remember that Friendster pretty much started it, but after their systems slowed to a crawl, everyone just picked up and moved to the next one. MySpace is not only performing poorly, but the ad glut is embarrasingly shameless.
I wrote about Apple making an entry into social networking with
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/A592FAA3-5A
I think one of the reasons that Myspace is so popular is that it allows the people who use it to be able to rank their popularity using the comments and friends list, and then compare it to their friends in real life. The more friends and comments they have, the more popular(or at least to them) they will be in the real world. They don't consider the quality of what they have on their pages to be as important as how much they have. Instead of keeping there people on there friends list that are actually their friends, they add people that they may barely know, or not know at all. They usually also try and usually make there pages as big and flashy as possible, and fill it with lots of random things to try and make it look more important and meaningful. When a person posts a comment on another persons page, they usually expect that that person will post one on there page(and they usually do), which is what I think is the cause of the lack of comments that seem to be repetitive and contentless.
So, what is MySpace anyways? Apart from being a place for children and molesters to meet eachother?
I checked www.myspace.com yesterday, and it looked like an ad portal, like altavista used to be (still is?). I thought it would be something like blogger, so I entered a name in the search field, but that just gave me a regular web search - just like altavista...
I really don't get it. What do people find so interesting about an altavista clone? And where does the children meeting molesters come in to the picture? Is there something behind the portal, a hidden entrance that I can't find. Or am I looking at the wrong domain?
Some of them realize that they shouldn't post that they live alone in an apartment in south-central LA, but others would very quickly post this sort of thing. Unfortunately, this again puts people at risk.
God, you've been watching too many Lifetime movies. Muggers and rapists don't go cruising online looking for people to solicit into meeting, to rob/rape/murder/whatever them. They just hang out near a dark street corner. It's a lot easier, cheaper, and doesn't leave an electronic 'paper trail', both on whatever service, and the crook's computer.
Most violent crimes are committed by people that know their victims; coworkers, friends, family, etc. That's precisely why you see reports of myspace-related crimes; they are by comparison EXTREMELY RARE. That's also why you see reports of old guys solicting minors and such online; it's also EXTREMELY RARE. Ever notice that you only really hear about these guys getting caught by cops posing as children? That's because even most kids aren't actually stupid enough to go and meet a stranger online. It's borderline entrapment, since a crime wouldn't happen if they weren't talking to a police officer.
I always laugh when I hear people discuss "how safe" it is to meet a potential date 'from the internet'. How is it any more dangerous than meeting someone for a date after they ask for your number at a bar?
Please help metamoderate.
Want a good example of how that "top site" statistic is a bunch of bullshit? I don't know a single person that uses Myspace. I know LOTS of people that have yahoo/gmail/etc webmail accounts.
Oh, and it doesn't hurt to have every other page return a server error or a blank page. I'm told Myspace's servers are about as reliable a crack addict.
Please help metamoderate.
John Chricton.
PILOT: John! They're eating my arms!
CHRICTON: Just keep the course. It's ok, they'll grow back.
PILOT: Bleaarrggghhhh!
CHRICTON: Pilot. Pilot. Stay with me!
PILOT: Bluhh Bluhhhhhhhhh Bluhhhhhh nnnNGGGHH.
CHRICTON: Here, suck my nipple and pull my penis.
PILOT: Apple computer?
CHRICTON: With Intel Pentium-D
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
SUN(Aeryn): John, how dare you wank without me!
CHRICTON: saddle-up darlyn, there's enough juice for everyone.
CHIANA: When do I jump in?
D'ALGO: Whith me, Chiana -- smack *penetrate*
CHIANA: Whoo hoo I can take it!
ZHAAN: Let me like your anus, D'algo.
D'ALGO: Oh yes!
SUN: Oh Yes!
CHIANA: OH Yes!
CHRICTON: OH YEEAAAAH Pilot!
MOYA: @#$*(&@#$*&( *hull-splitting-orgasm*
AHHHHHHHH (everyone is sucked into the vaccuum of space, each at their climax)
SCORPIUS: The galaxy is mine!
Wrong. This is news for nerds indeed. DIRE NEWS!
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits.
4.5% of all bits transferred over the internet? 4.5% of all bits transferred over http? 4.5% of all requests made over http? Something tells me giganews.com transfers more bits than myspace.com, but that's just a hunch.
I'm 15 and myspace is great for kids like me to hang out and chat. I sometimes get help with my homework and stuff. Also I can talk to my friends and see what there doing. Also like it's a place for people to put up memorials for dead people. Like my friend Mitchell who killed himself. Like he was really depressed when his Ipod got stolen. They say he had like mental problems or something. But we didn't know. Anyway thanks to myspae we can talk to him and leave messages for him. Cause we know he be watching from heaven.
Steve
<3
Asscuse me, but is that an ass?
Seeing a 4300% increase in visits in just two short years
/. "news" about myspace and that figure could easily go to about twohundredgazillion percent.
// In other news I made a site yesterday and I was the only visitor. Today there were 43 visitors.
Like that would mean anything. Anyway, a few more dozen
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Recently, slashdot ran this article about Ask.com's growing market share. CEO Jim Lanzone has complained that his service is superior to competitors, but has not yet approached the market share of the Google-ocracy. The reason? Like Xerox before it, Google has become a part of our common venacular in 2006 (to google, I googled it, etc). Some expect Google will remain on top for this reason alone, others claim that superior technology is how Google became #1 in the first place, and so, Ask.com has a chance.
So what does this have to do with MySpace? MySpace currently finds itself in a similar position; unlike rivals such as Facebook or Friendster (remember them?) their market share is simply in a league all its own. I also see another important difference which secures this position for MySpace- when trying another search engine, my total expended time equals about 10 seconds; type, click, go. I don't need to register for anything, and my experience is dependant on nothing more than the latest search algorithms. With a social network, I must invest a significant amount of time in order to setup my profile, and the experience is dependant on how many friends (or similar-minded people) I can find also using the service. Once I have become comfortable using one service, I might be hesitant to "start over" at another, especially if none of my friends were using it either.
Simply put: we have seen, and will continue to see "MySpace killers" and "MySpace clones" boasting the latest AJAX-happy Web 2.0 goodness; but will the users of MySpace take notice? If they notice, will they care enough to make a switch?
MySpace is a very powerful web brand, and I for one think it has only just begun. If I were Rubert Murdoch, I would begin expanding the resources and revenue streams availble to it. When will "MySpace Records" begin distribution in the major retail outlets? And what about tv? How many pilot episodes is fox sitting on right now? Why allow a boardroom to make those decisions? The users on MySpace could do a better job selecting the next "big hit", all without expecting one red cent in compensation! After all, how many of these same users will be buying these same shows on DVD next year?
As MySpace has shown us: we a nation of aspiring and puedo-celebrities. In MySpace I see the potential for hundreds of new reality tv shows, dozens of new animated series, thousands of screenplays...I could go on and on. Properly managed, MySpace can, and I believe will, become a self-sustaining, media-generating, media-consuming machine.
barack to the future?
I agree with many of the comments here about myspace being inane and mostly full of worthless content free crap. However...with so many consumer oriented people in one place, its probably the best free marketing tool ever made. Look at how many big companies are advertising myspace web addresses...they know young people are much more likely to check out the site with that sort of address I have made a decent amount of money solely from advertising my products on myspace. You can even target demographics through the advanced search function...adding them as friends is the exact same as getting one exposure to a customer through an advertisement.
Law of Evolution at work. I think I just began hating that site a bit less.
Call me troll all you want, in ancient times these people would throw rocks at bears or play with scorpions. Nowadays they electrocute themselves with toasters and post their personal data to myspace. The gene pool profits.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Read up and be informed!
Synergy is your friend
If the Internet was a person, myspace would be a 2,000 pound tumor on it's brain. This is the worst of all possible sites to be #1 on my beloved internets. I have a higher regard for shock sites.
That a website, employing no really innovative means of communication, no real creativity, and little hope for any constructive use can be so popular among regular (non geek, non nerd) young people is as I see it a sign of nothing good. I suppose in a decase or two we will see the results of such.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
What's really amusing while I'm on campus is when Myspace is down. Considering the construction of it and the vast amount of traffic, that's not rare. Students will greet each other with, "Oh my God, Myspace is down! I need to check to see if more people have added me!" It's like chickens with their heads cut off.
In other news I made a site yesterday and I was the only visitor. Today there were 43 visitors.
That would only be an increase of 4200%.
Who the Hell Cares ?...
LifeTime Gamer
They are taking over OUR Internet!
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I discovered the usenet in 1988. There was a time when googling my name turned up several pages of old usenet postings I had made. Luckily there a lots more people with my last name online these days and some of them are prominent for one reason or another. It takes a pretty well informed person do dig up much of my old dirt but it is there. I kept a journal when I was about 12 to about 16 years old. I cannot express how mortifying it would be to have what I wrote then, be available to all at any time.
-- QED
Yes it may very well be only 1 page from millions but that is no different from that one diary from the millions written during WW2.
Offcourse it may also not happen, lets hope it does not. WW3 is a bit to high a price to pay for making a myspace account memorable.
But lets say that the myspace accounts of the people at columbine were known. The pictures of those kids drinking and indulging in mass-produced but ineffectual rebellioness. The murderes, their friends, the bullies, the victims. They would give us a glimpse into that small world in wich all of them lived leading up to that day. A far more accurate view then we have now in wich after all only the survivors get to tell their version of events AFTER the fact.
There are several books that contain letters from various war fronts. None of these letters are works of art by themselves but they have significance because they are often the last words these people wrote given us some glimpse into a world we hopefully will never experience ourselves. They are far more accurate then accounts written afterwards because those accounts are by definition only written by survivors and will always be colored by the fact that the person survived. A person saying his was worried he was going to die does not have the same impact as the words from a person unworried about death who has died. Why do you think disaster docu's usually delay introducing the survivors telling their tale? Because it ruins the suspence if you can see they survived. Ghoulish perhaps, that is for smarter people to judge, but effective.
This does not mean I feel like visiting myspace to trawl through it anymore then I would feel like going through the billions of war correspondence letters or the millions of diaries written. Yet somewhere, there may be a myspace account that tells us an extra ordinary story.
Oh and don't feel all that high and mighty, /. is hardly superior to myspace. More technobablle and less nude girls but the same mass-produced but ineffectual rebelliouness.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Myspace is Slashdot's Anti-Christ.
What with all the drug and gang activity why would people not be flocking to the site? Its a good thing our government is a step ahead of us in protecting our children.
I'm sorry but this is not accurate. Myspace did a complete end run around the "old media" record companies. There are thousands of artists on there that would never have a shot at traditional distribution that are now leveraging the fact that they can be discovered, heard and shared with others. Perhaps you're refering to News Corp.'s recent acquisition, or the new Wired cover. It's not quite clear.
For example, their obsession with "child predators" as of late probably has little to do with protecting children and everything to do with making sure that their system is fenced off from "that big nasty mean world out there".
I'm not sure if I understand you here. Are you implying that people on myspace don't share links to the rest of the internet?
They are the "bread and circuses" of the information age. Feed em crap, keep em happy, and most of all keep their eyes and ears distracted from political and financial issues of the real world.
I believe this a valid criticism of The Spectacle at large and it's unfair to level this complaint solely at Myspace. I mean really, what distinguishes Myspace from NBC? Or nearly any other facet of popular American culture for that matter. I'm surprised how blindly biased the supposedly scientific Slashdot community is towards Myspace. This is generally without even trying the site out and is often based on a simplified caricature of the typical user profile. It's a meme run amok. Not everyone on the site is in high school.
harmonious design
You should know better. As many will have noticed, this rant is almost identical to those one encountered in the mid-nineties, which protested all those ugly web pages people where suddenly able to make. First of all, why do you care about what others make, especially when you don't go there yourself. I think this is disturbing. Let them be. Second, all the ranting about ugliness and bar talk is irrelevant and takes the attention away from the real facts: people are empowered with communication tools; it will lead to many great things you couldn't imagine. The only narcissism witnessed here, is from the ranters. They want to control others. What others do, is not good enough for them, they feel superior, comfortably forgetting that when they were 15, they were watching crap like the A-team. Well I did. If it where up to you guys, the web would have been smothered in its early incarnations, because the vast majority made ugly pages. Aristocracy at these early point in Internet history is laughable really, and the way of the dinosaur. Better not listen to you ;) I think what's far more interesting to explore is how people can have some kind of after-control or rights regarding their privacy online, in a general non-Myspace related way. Should people be able to tell Google to remove this or that embarrasing Usenet posting, or Archive.org to remove a particular site? Is that realistic? Etc. etc.
In, oh, probably 1998 or so, I heard from a friend who worked at a tier-1 ISP that fully 2% of their total backbone traffic was to Geocities. This horrified us at the time, that such a huge portion of the 'net was devoted to people's crappy animated flame HR gifs.
As we all know, Geocites then went on to conquer the Internet.
Slashdotters losing faith in the dot due to irritating use of popup ads. Of course the average user is only aware of it as Firefox has a little less screen real-estate due to the popup blocker bar at the top of the screen.
!sig
Is it just me or is Myspace really, strangely, the complete inversion of Slashdot? (Profiles, topics, content, etc.)
In the beginning, maybe 50% of all Internet content was crap.
Years later, when I first had access to it, maybe 90% of the internet was crap.
As it seems, now maybe 99% of the Internet is crap.
But, for as long as we have good search engines, it really doesn't matter that much.
Myspace users accounted for nearly 10% (2gb) of my bandwidth usage last month from my general webserving box. Mostly by people using a direct link to a 4Meg image for their background image. Fortunatly this has been largely mitigated with an apache rewrite redirecting myspace users to a polite message asking them to stop.
However this leads me to wonder how much bandwidth myspace is sucking from non-myspace servers just so users can have pretty background pages and other assorted images. Helping support Rupert Murdoch isn't something I'm happy to waste bandwidth on.
Im 34, my beautiful, wonderful, amazing girlfriend I met through myspace is 33, my myspace friends are all mid 20s to low 40s. Ive met and socialised with some, and romanced a few too and its all been pretty damn cool so far. Its been good for finding a partner, finding friends, and finding fuckbuddies and those ive met have interests similar to mine. Seeing all the myspace hate in this thread, perhaps having a pc/mac/net enthusiast, video game playing, star trek watching, sci fi & fantasy fan female friend/or more isn't the type of thing slashdot readers are looking for? I just avoided the kiddies/teens/emo's with a simple age filter on searches and it actually turned out to be one of the better websites about for meeting new people.
Anyone know if a Myspace user has typed that Shakespeare sonnet yet?
Strange use of figures here...Initially .1% of all internet visits, then 1% of all Internet trafic...Lastly week ending July 8th the figure is compared with US stats and not global. So comparitively speaking it is a little bit questionable the figures quoted.
Karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
But, most of all, samy is my Hero. http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/10/14/126233.shtml?ti d=172&tid=95&tid=220
*WHY* did they choose such a badly designed website !?
Damn.
Alexis 'jeriqo' BRET
What on earth is "weekly percent of market share" anyway? The Slashdot article misparaphrases this as percentage of hits, which is nonsense.
It appears to me that they have selected commercial sites according to category, and then tracked the number of people that visit these sites in a week. Perhaps -- and I'm only guessing -- it means that about 5% of those surveyed visited myspace.com in a given week. That's a far cry from saying that 5% of all accesses were to Myspace.
The bottom line is that the statistic is completely meaningless unless defined. Without a definition there is no point in quibbling about how precisely or accurately it is being measured.
/. readers suddenly realize they are not the center of the universe.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I love it! Date rape me pls!!! a/s/l LOLcopter!
wow... Go read a crap load of personal profiles.... Oh what fun....
[/sarcasm]
I'm not one for traditional MySpace bashing. I don't find MySpace to be the most horrible thing ever invented, nor a travesty to the internet realm. However, I also do not find it to be anything remarkable or special by any stretch of the imagination, and just could never seem to get into it much. I gave it a real try when I was first invited to use it: I made a profile, checked it occasionally, even tried to make it look nice, but in the end, MySpace just wasn't much fun and started to annoy me. Now, I basically use it just to send messages to old friends telling them to call me. It has become basically a crappy e-mail system for me. I think the main reason for this is my technology side: MySpace always just seemed poorly done to me. It has attracted innumerous people to it, there is no doubt about that. But this attraction is clearly based upon the social networking capacities only, because everything else I have found to be lacking. It is very slow (I would imagine this to be a result of ColdFusion), buggy, and just generally funny looking. I could never get used to the interface. In the end, I applaud the creators of MySpace for making some so wildly successful, but it just isn't for me.
Student Manager - Take control of your education!
You hire one of those scuzzy link farmer guys to ensure that any real Google results using your name are drowned out by a torrent of linkspam sites and newsposts advertising 0EM s0ftwar3.
I quit!
2008's presidential candidates should start campaigning on MySpace now, shouldn't they? It might be the only way to increase voter turnout.
The whole "American Idol receives more votes than the presidential election" still bothers me. Sure in Idol, you can vote multiple times, but the sheer number of votes anyway still makes a point. So maybe MySpace can come up with a way to start a voting hype. Maybe more embedded midis or floating Flash windows to spread the word.
Has Myspace patented having friends yet? I think there's big money to be made in that racket.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
I just clicked on the link above to goatse.ch, expecting a gaping asshole to jump out at me. I was not disappointed, however, dangling underneath was a rancid surprise: a corporate ad! I beseech you all to boycott the goatse.ch mirror -- they've taken a beautiful thing, and tainted it with such corruption.
Don't tell anyone, but Google returns value. MySpace helps child molesters get TV exposure.
I'm pretty sure Google has the better business model.
I'm willing to bet in the long run MySpace fizzles out because it does not have a sustainable business model.
Teenagers are fickle, and MySpace mostly enables their less expensive tendacy: droning on endlessly about how life sucks.
For as much as people parrot the model of teen consumer spending, there are a couple problems with that market:
1. They are a shrinking percentage of the population.
2. There is massive competition for their buck.
3. They don't have much money, they spend it like they're retarded.
4. The real money in our economy is exchanged between businesses.
In the long run, MySpace and NewsCorp are dumping a lot of money into selling ads to people who don't like ads. Worse, they are paying so kids can post band lyrics for free.
If MySpace ever turns a profit I'd be very surprised.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
A couple weeks ago I created a MySpace, more just to learn how it works since everybody I know uses it...I have built a friends networks, left messages, built my silly little profile...
I dunno about everybody else, but to me it seems very poorly done, has a horrible UI that is very unintuitive...seems to me this relatively simply concept could be done MUCH better...
dB Masters
As much as people like to criticize the website, I've actually had some old friends find me and it's been nice to catch back up on things.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
I'm wondering if they are counting unique page loads, or unique visitors. The fact that people reload the poorly rendered pages so often, or get timeouts while loading stuff could skew that result. If i put a meta refresh tag in my page, I could similarly skew results if it is just counting page loads.
today is spelling optional day.
i think it's like a refuge for kids, a club where they can communicate with....??? (mystery people).....isn't there another one called Hi5.com kinda famous as well ?
I don't find it that sad, try to see the good side of it. I think it's pretty cool to have *one* *free* social site where everybody goes, because well, everybody's there, am I the only one out here to realize what's so cool about it?
You just got troll'd!
There is a hilarious song that begs to be mentioned here. It is called the MySpace Waltz by the bluegrass band One Way Rider.
http://www.myspace.com/onewayrider
It is an observable FACT.
-
You are not alone in your arguement. You are supported by medieval scholars who decried the rise of literacy, the government of the UK when the printing press was made, and many more anti-intellectual pessimists throughout history. They held your very same belief, what sort of chaos and tragedy will occur if everybody is literate? Peasants are dumb and uncultured, they will only polute the literary pool. You say the same shit about the internet.
The only difference now is that we have SEARCH ENGINES, computers, and instant communication to help us sort through the bullshit. People like you like to ignore the fact that if only 1 out of every 99 people posting to myspace create something worthwhile, thats one more worthwhile thing on the internet to be found and shared.
I believe the viral spread of information has not reached its full potential, myspace is a step in the right direction. Google and other search engines are helping too. You act as if removing the hundreds of worthless expressions are worth the cost of forgoing one worthwhile contribution. You conveniently forget that by reading slashdot you are getting a selection of top articles for discussion over thousands of "unworthy" articles submited a day.
I think the only reason people like you get depressed is because you dont understand the internet. You don't see how instant communication changes the way things work. We can't rely on an intellectual authority anymore to tell us what is good and bad. Millions of people on myspace are expressing themselves in ways they never knew they could, even if most of it is terrible html they are having a learning experience and real social interaction. You want to take all that away because its easy to dismiss as trash? Don't add them as your friends, don't even sign up for myspace. In fact you should probably stop visiting slashdot, it should depress you that so many articles get submitted that are worthless, wasting the editors time, and our time when one slips through. You'd rather not have slashdot and save the internet the trouble right?
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
How funny that all the sad little elitists of Slashdot are picking on myspace.
/. crowd should be calling and mailing their senators to oppose the infringement of government into the internet.
./ instead.
Everyone here is guilty of the same sin- applying The Entropy Law Of Intellect, which states that humans engage in activities most easy at their intellectual level.
Meaning for a teen, blogging, networking, and making friends is at the easiest and most fun. Not reading scientific materials or self-education.
But look at slashdot. The
We should be demanding a boycott of China for it's freedom of speech and human rights violations.
We should be actively working on developing vast encrypted stand-alone networks that cannot be filtered out, an internet within the internet.
Yet what the brightest and geekiest choose is posting comments on
The entropy law of intellect applies.
So don't go crapping on myspace when you're doing the exact same thing on your own level- being content at the lowest level of intellectual activity for your developmental stage.
--- Nothing but Blood and Kosmos
That is all.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
That reason, and that alone, is reason enough to avoid Myspace.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I mention Crichton because he's a well-known writer, not because he's a great thinker. The parent to which I was responding complained about the lack of good and interesting writing (IIRC, I'm too lazy at this point to double-check, but that was my impression), and the point is that interesting writing can be interesting either because it's incredibly deep and intellectual, incredibly entertaining, or some combination of both.
But whether the question is about entertaining writing (i.e. name any trashy novelist you want) or incisive and groundbreaking writing (i.e. name any thinker or scientist you want), the point is that the average Joe is not a professional at either.
I spent most of my early undergraduate career working to pay my tuition as an appliance delivery man, riding on trucks to wheel new washers and dryers into apartment buildings and so on. Great guys, but a million miles from deep and completely ungrammatical in every way. They were very happy to accept what (as far as they could see) life gives people: an accidental wife that was a former high-school classmate, some beer, some pizza, things to want to buy as seen in weekly sale mailers, and a sitcom. If you were to track down their myspace pages now (assuming they even had any) I have no doubt that they'd be the most inane, ungrammatical prose about getting laid, liking beer, needing a smoke, and how hard it is to take a proper piss when drunk.
That doesn't mean they aren't nice guys, but the point (and answer to the question is) that if they were Michael Crichton or any other professional or semiprofessional writer (i.e. think: any Salon.com contributor) they could weave layings, beers, smokes, and pissing into at least a light and amusing read, and if they were Einstein or any other professional thinker, they'd intone about what layings, beers, smokes, and pissing say about us all or about the causal nexus or the universe. But either attempt would have given the guys I worked with a severe headache and they'd probably just have ended up punching whomever demanded it--and on that point, I'm positive they'd agree with me (I italicize this in response to others in this thread who call me an elitist).
To expect an average joe to be able to write competently or to write weightily is no different from expecting every Ph.D. to be able to pack a bearing with grease, weld a body panel onto a car, or install and plumb up an icemaker--or to want to.
And no, Michael Crichton is not my favorite writer. In fact, I've never read a single thing he wrote. But he is published and is thus a professional or semiprofessional writer--which is what 99% of myspacers are not.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The U.S is going where in a hand-basket?
It would be the 12th most populated country in the world with 92,658,806 users/people.
interesting about friendster... your post inspired me to have a look at friendster's alexa rankings
not too shabby... looks like they did *something* about the beginning of the year, because traffic really took off then
Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.
This error has been forwarded to MySpace's technical group.
Why do 95% of all comments on MySpace consist of some variation of "thx 4 the add"?
Myspace doesn't have anything like an automatic checker for email and new blogs, unlike gmail and Yahoo mail. No one has to refresh their email accounts repeatedly to check for new messages - they have a little blue envelope telling them when to go open their gmail account.
:D
So, in part from people checking for new messages, Myspace gets to claim that they get more traffic than any other site in the U.S. What's probably more important to them is that they also get hits for ads that people wouldn't see if they didn't have the compulsion to check every five minutes.
Not that I'd ever do that...
...is that anyone, anywhere, can post anything online.
The worst thing about the internet is that anyone, anywhere, can post anything online."
(To quote GrumpySimon)
As soon as I showed her how to view HTML source and what parts of the CSS were for which part of her page, she was off and running. She now has a pretty good grasp on CSS rules, classes, and properties. I figure even the most cynical of us would appreciate that.
Also, there's a MySpace group of 21 Slashdot members. So sad that the intersection of the groups is that small. I know there are more who are on both, but just aren't part of the group. *slinks away in shame*
Yeah, that's why I still work at Burger King at 37 years old. It is just so hard rewriting all that old information just to fill out a resume so that I can get a new job where none of my friends are.
Maybe someday myspace will raise the minimum wage so that I can quit eating people's leftovers in order to survive. I know myspace will achieve this, just like I am sure that myspace will someday soon cure cancer and find my birthparents. It's all a matter of time. Nothing but good things, myspace. Good...things.