NEWS: Like a Digital High School Cafeteria...

MUSIC: Like a Digital High School Cafeteria...

Wired examines the MySpace revolution and explains how bands can use it to turn free pixels into fame and fortune: it's all about how many "friends" you have, apparently...

www.myspace.com/addmeeeeeeee

:-(

Yeah, friends... my own band could use a couple more of those, given that we're not quite famous yet...

and just like a high school cafeteria it promises the same poor maintenance and the spread of viruses.

oh, and Rupert Murdock doesn't give half a shit how many friends you have, as long as you continue to click on the pop-up ads.

And just yesterday I saw someone's journal entry here on SG that said they were quitting and going back to Myspace because the networking features there were "better". And I was like...

Give Us A Contract!!Mwhahahahaaaa!!!

MySpace is a marketers wet dream. Honestly.

Look at the search options. Have a demographic? Fill in the blanks and you just found a rather large group of people that will check you out if they're from the ages of 16 - 35. *Especially* if it involves music, a bar, or some other interesting event.

How do I know this? MySpace is where I do *a lot* of my marketing work. It's the cheapest, easiest way to reach thousands of people in just minutes. The faster your connection and the more patience you have, the more people you can reach.

I only heard about Myspace one year ago, (literally 10.31.05) and since then I've only been less and less of a fan.

The only people who've marketed to me on MySpace have been girls who don't know me but were just browsing some people around her area on the site and came across my profile and would like to chat sometime, get to know each other and hang out, She has a lot more pics she can let me see also if I want. If I'm interested, why don't I email her at her regular address. It's just a lot more convenient for her 'cause she doesn't come on this site much at all and she checks her other mail every day. Her username there is Sara3C005 the at sign and hot mail dot com.

As much as myspace is a blight, I have to give them credit. As a developer, they've really given me pause as to the value of "good programming" and "best practices."

Doing the whole site in Cold Fusion of all things, it breaks down all the time, it's constantly freaking out under the stress and is unreliable at best, it allows users to do ungodly things with HTML, CSS and even sometimes scripts on their pages (anybody remember the myspace hero worm?) etc. etc. The best decision they made was to make their music player in flash, but even the XML playlist loading has been complete crap of late, I'd say 70% at best. They've had to shut down IM, chat rooms, and the block the embed tag as I'm typing this...

What I'm saying is, based on most of what I know it's a "How Not To" of web sites. But its the most popular one out there right now. Worthy of deep analysis.

You know which one I find enjoyable to use? Facebook. Friendster, though, was good in the brief interlude between "upgraded enough to actually be usable" and "trying to be MySpace".

I don't understand the appeal of myspace... it just pisses me off to look at it. It's an ugly site, so ugly I cringe when people tell me to check out their myspace profile. It's tacky like using the Mistral font for well, anything.