My MySpace experiment
As part of the preparation for the What MySpace Means, the event I’m putting on next month for my Engagement Alliance non-profit, this weekend I created my own MySpace profile.
When I went back this morning to update all of the fields of my profile, spending about an hour doing so (and saving my changes periodically), I was dismayed to find later that my profile had remained completely unchanged. Not an auspicious start.
Related: MySpace’s marketing VP, Jamie Kantrowitz, was recently boasting that the average user session is 21 minutes. If I’m not the only one who invests a major chunk of time in updating her profile, only to have all of the changes disappear into the aether, I can see why that is. Not exactly a positive.
Other first impressions as an active user:
I’m getting a TON of pop-up ads from Error Safe, a MySpace advertiser, which seems to want to run some software on my computer. Er…no. For all of MySpace’s success from engagement, their embrace of interruptive pop-ups betrays a short-sighted revenue strategy.
As noted previously by many others, the site’s navigation is excruciatingly cumbersome. It can’t be hard to build a better MySpace than this.
No wonder they’ve got 70,000 registered users - you have to register just to read beyond the front page of any profile.
They say they never spam users, but they sure don’t make it too difficult for other members to spam you. (An associate reported that he had his first discount pharmaceutical spam within minutes of joining; I had spam from get-rich-quick-schemers pretty quickly, and an invite to join a dodgy-looking MySpace webcam group.)
Teenagers are so much cooler now than when I was a kid. Or maybe it’s just the teenagers I know (like my 17-year-old friend Tafv - PeacePilgrim on MySpace - who is the daughter of my friend, the writer Nancy Rommelmann). This mystique about young people now is surely an element in the rabid fascination with MySpace. How long can this novelty factor help them cash in? I wonder.
Filed under: Life
Hello,
This is an interesting post as it seems like you did not have the best experience with MySpace. Although MySpace is on the rise, I believe that as users transition to the corporate world, they will move to more professional blogging. I have already seen it!
Blogging has helped me tremendously, as I share what I learn, network with others, and start thinking like a business professional.
Good experiment. Keep me updated with your MySpace research.
Take care,
Christopher Salazar
Jackie, MySpace certainly must be doing something right, what with its 80 million users and all. In the U.S. at least, it was also the second-most visited site behind Yahoo last month.
But I would agree with you about the cumbersome navigation. In fact, I would use the word nightmarish.
Maybe if we are ten years younger, it would make much more sense?
Christopher: I’d suggest knowing a bit about a blogger before posting comments to their blog.
Bryan: I know the stats on MySpace, and I agree that they are right now doing something that is working for them - but that does not mean that they cannot do better, or that what they are doing will bring longterm success. These, to me, are more interesting matters.
Ten years younger…Hmm. At 18, I only had one e-mail address (which came automatically with my enrollment at university). Back then, I had to use a hideously laggy UNIX system to check email (PINE!) and Lynx as a text-only browser. MySpace probably would have made my head explode.
Jackie, wasn’t meaning to be flippant with your furstrations with MySpace at all. I’ve had some of the same in my own experience on the site.
Part of what I find intriguing about MySpace — and worth exploring from a communicator’s point of view — is how it is attracting so many users in spite of it being so bloody difficult to use.
Bad and inconsistent navigation and usability. Unreadable profile pages (sometimes). Major lag (usually). Having to log in just to get past the front page of a profile (always).
And yet it’s booming! What does it all mean? Wish I could be at your one-day event on June 21 to find out the answers that you and the panel come up with.
Hi Jackie - your Errosafe experience is not untypical. I did a writeup at
http://www.crypticide.com/dropsafe/articles/media/post20060308091742.comments
…in which others have shared their experiences too. The short version is: have nothing to do with them, and possibly complain to their advert hosters, in my case dilbert.com.
Holy crap, thanks for that, Alec. If only for search engine purposes, this deserves its own dedicated shout-out post.