[Sigia-l] Your take on MySpace

[Listera]

Maynard, Robert:
> MySpace is primarily a multimedia playground for novice bitheads.

Well, MySpace has been the most spectacular growth phenomenon since Napster.
At 56MM users, MySpace has more pageviews per day than any other site on the
web except Yahoo and more than Google or MSN. It has twice the number of
users than there are blogs out there (28MM). So it's not just big, it's
arguably the biggest usage explosion in the history of the Internet. (Did I
just say that?) What happens at MySpace should thus concern us all.


Jonathan Baker-bates:
> Instead, what we can offer is better design

It's interesting to note that, of the two biggest usage explosions in
Internet's history, Napster and MySpace, neither relied on design as a
driving force. Napster had a semi-interesting transfer protocol (for its
time), but for overall architecture/design/IA/feature set, it was sorely
lacking. So it seems with MySpace.


Alexander Rudloff:
> Design != Popularity.

So while design isn't popularity, the question Napster/MySpace may be
raising is: are they antithetical?

You may all find this interesting:

(COO) Peter Chernin:

"...We need to reorganize the sales force, add sales people and really begin
to monetize what's really a pretty extraordinary amount of traffic and page
views."

>From a recent Fox job posting:

"...Top-tier online advertisers such as Nike, Target, Interscope, Cingular,
Universal Music, Dreamworks, Sony, Victoria¹s Secret, and others looking to
hit the 16-34 market are working with MySpace to come up with cool and
creative ways to reach our audience."

It looks like MySpace is going "commercial." Would that mean design will
play a role now? Will this dampen its growth?


Liz Stevens:

> Or is it asking what gives MySpace a competitive edge over Friendster?

Well, Friendster crashed and burned, MySpace succeeded.

> I'm a 25 year old user of both, and I've noticed a strange elitist mentality
> of MySpace users.

Why do you say that? It's by far the biggest/most popular thing out there;
how can that be elitist?

Incidentally, somewhat funny take on social networking/MySpace on Jon
Stewart (video):

<http://tinyurl.com/ldkcu>

----
Ziya

Design is doing for a dime what anyone can do for a dollar.