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
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.
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...
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.
90% of the replies to this story will amount to "I believe I'm too cool for MySpace."
Myspace is the most pointless, horribly designed site on the internet.
In other news, MySpace was designed.
Clue to all geeks everywhere:
Nobody cares that MySpace runs on code that is inelegant, nor that it results in sloppy-looking personal pages
It's a big ol' mess, but it's a big ol' mess that a lot of young folks find useful. End of story.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The "single women all over who post their info online" are 45-year-old fat males.
The "children" are FBI agents.
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.
On another note, Micrososft is working with them very closely to convert their server farm from Cold Fusion to ASP.Net 2.0.
.NET version of BlueDragon. BlueDragon is a .NET (or Java) application that runs ColdFusion code as an alternative to Adobe's ColdFusion server.
.NET on a competitor's server not theirs and .NET because it's written in a competitor's language. Not surprising that they're 'working closely' to fix that!
This is an interesting one. MySpace is written in ColdFusion but actually runs on the
So what we have currently is a situation where:
1. Adobe can't really claim that MySpace is running ColdFusion because it's running in
2. Microsoft isn't really crowing about MySpace running
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
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.
Actually, we as geeks care. We care because we put lots of effort into making our code work elegantly and our websites look good, and it doesn't seem to make any difference. We care, because we're really great at this stuff, but marketing trumps usability every time. We care because Myspace sucks, but there are millions of people using it, and it's like a big slap in the face for every one of us who put any effort into our work.
qntm.org
MySpace is well designed, you just can't see the forest for the trees.
Firstly, go read this article which talks about what geeks call "marketing", which is often used as a throwaway term for all the parts of running a software business that the programmers don't really understand or care about. MySpace has not done any serious marketing. It grew entirely through word of mouth.
Next, go actually look at MySpace, and do it through the eyes of a non-technical young person. I don't mean a 16 year old, though I'm sure there are lots there, I mean anybody under 35. MySpace offers the following things:
It's distracting and fun. It has lots of features that let people spend their time just faffing around - redesigning their profile yet again, finding cool bands, seeing who their friends friends are, writing on peoples walls etc. If there's nothing good on TV and they don't have much energy it's an easy way to be entertained.
It lets people express themselves. Ever wondered why almost every MySpace profile page is customised? Well, people just love to express themselves. How many people live in a room with no ornaments or posters or personal artifacts? Hardly anybody right? Why do people blow 8mb of memory on a wallpaper that will sit under their copy of Word for 90% of the day? Why do people use annoying custom ringtones that they change every few weeks? People like to customise their personal space, it's just a part of who we are, and MySpace allows you to do that.
It's a quick and easy way for musicians to get their music out to the masses. See the example of Lily Allen in the UK for somebody who made it big via MySpace. Ditto for I think the Arctic Monkeys.
It can be used as a dating site even though it's not marketed that way.
It used to be that people met through local institutions ... if you go back and ask your grandmother how she met your grandfather I wouldn't be surprised to hear an answer like "we went to the same church" or "he worked in a local shop and I saw him every day when buying groceries". This sort of thing is now very uncommon. People live more isolated lives, and it's often hard to date people you meet through work due to workplace politics - this is especially true of slightly older types who are in management.
So it's not surprising that surveys and studies everywhere show that use of internet dating is way, way up and growing all the time. But it still has some social stigma attached to it. MySpace lets you search peoples profiles by region and easily contact them, which is all you really need to have a "dating site", except anybody who is on there can simply say they are there because their friends are there, because they like the bands etc. And for people looking it's better too, as people tend to post (mostly) real photos and don't just make stuff up, because they know their friends might see it.
It has lots and lots and lots of people
Some things MySpace doesn't have: technical sophistication, robustness, speed - all the things geeks value. These things do matter, look at how totally Facebook has crushed MySpace amongst those who have access to it. But never discount the value of a good social design, because these sites aren't tech demos, they are social networking sites.