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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
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
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
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.
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...
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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
The "single women all over who post their info online" are 45-year-old fat males.
The "children" are FBI agents.
All it means is they got slashdotted in the past week....
Video Production Support
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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"
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.
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%.
Myspace is Slashdot's Anti-Christ.
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
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
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.
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!
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