I’ve never been a big fan of MySpace. The interface is counterintuitive, the flashing ads are an eyesore and the code is a mess. The news that the site is over the proverbial hill doesn’t come as any shock.
Social networks are very helpful for people that want to reach hip, tech-savvy young folks. But eventually, the walled-garden model will fall by the wayside entirely. In its place will be a set of easy-to-install widgets that attach to a server like add-ons attach to Firefox. These widgets will allow folks to blog, share and tag photos, respond to messages, generate feeds, network personally and professionally, or whatever else they want to do. Social networks as we know them will meld seamlessly with the other functions of the Web.
So where does that leave musicians, record labels, clubs and other organizations that want to use MySpace, Facebook and other social networks to promote themselves? Back at square one: hosting their own blog.
I couldn’t agree more with Flick of Puddlegum when he writes, “I’d rather focus my energies developing my own traffic than nursing off of a corporate monster.” Organizations should build out their own websites, host their own blogs and make social networks an offshoot. Building your own hub of information about yourself is always a better solution than scattering your information to the winds and hoping that your fan base will continue to frequent whichever site you’ve spent the most time and energy building a presence on.
Technorati Tags: MySpace, Facebook, social networks, widgets, blogs
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
steven e. streight aka vaspers the grate 11.24.06 at 2:31 pm
Bravo. The toilet of MySpace has been justly doomed from the beginning. This is one of the best posts I’ve read anywhere in a long time, and not just because I have a knee-jerk agreement with it.
I started a MySpace blog a long while ago, just to tell Robert Murdoch that he’s a pervert coddler and predator enabler. That’s all I did with it, and I get requests quite frequently to accept people as “Friends” and such.
My buddy Dieter Kiefer, who argues with me constantly, once said MySpace is 6 million poor kids hawking their music to 6 million other poor kids. Ads are flashing, soft porn is jumping, but nobody’s buying anybody else’s music.
I get annoyed when I go to a musician blog anywhere and see no FREE mp3s to download. Talking about music is the #1 worst way to sell it, and providing free samples of entire songs and albums is the #1 best way to sell it.
Use the FREE to get the PAID. This works for software and all other products. You may not give out free Cadillacs, but you can distribute free advice and related items to generate buzz and good will.
Jessica Duquette 11.25.06 at 7:31 am
Interesting, my 15 year old daughter, who was an avowed MySpace user until recently, has been looking to migrate over to Facebook, I didn’t realize this was an overwhelming trend!
Drew Meyers 11.25.06 at 11:42 am
GREAT post Teresa. Very well said-I think myspace is a piece of crap personally & have basically stopped using it much ever since I started my personal blog. Facebook is still a useful tool, but the future in my opinion is social networks tied into blogs (hmmm…mybloglog??).
Teresa Valdez Klein 11.27.06 at 5:33 pm
Vaspers: I agree with you about musicians giving away free songs. I wish that rising country star Sarah Buxton would give away free .mp3s of her first single, “Innocence.” Instead, she hosts it on her MySpace page and nowhere else. It’s really lame.
Jessica: Your daughter has good taste. Facebook has a prettier interface and has better privacy settings than MySpace. It’s also growing more interesting by the day.
Drew: You make me blush. I agree that Facebook won’t last forever, but I think it’s the best of the social networks at the moment. I hope they continue to grow and adapt. Maybe one day, they’ll make a social networking widget that people can integrate into their Websites.
Rhys Allen 11.28.06 at 6:48 am
My apologies if I’m not supposed to comment here (the site is public but the URL suggests otherwise…).
Regardless, I think it’s important to note that MySpace wasn’t set up to be a large scale marketing tool. It’s meant to BE social networking, and that’s it. Period. As much as Sprite likes to make out, the ‘kids’ don’t judge how cool they are by what type of soft drink they like to consume.
In my experience (I’m a high school multimedia teacher) adolescent kids tend to prefer simple, but funky interfaces. The majority seem to admire people with over-developed, awesome MySpace sites, but at the same time pity them for not having something better to do with their time.
Take forums, for example. I wander around a number of forums, many of which tend to link together at various nodes (depending on content, of course). The level of customising is limited to a personal avatar, their name, a personal title, and a signature at the end of each of their posts. Now, I would think it’d be a pretty safe bet to say that most people looking to do the bare minimum (*ahem*…the kids…) would much prefer to be spending their time on a forum, than on MySpace.
I would be very interested to see how the numbers compare in terms of active FORUM accounts to active MYSPACE accounts. I suspect that the former would come out the most popular.
Ideas are what count, and if it takes hours and hours of design and development of a MySpace account in order to coax people to listen to their ideas, I honestly don’t think that kids will keep it up. That essentially makes MySpace non-viable in terms of marketing if the demographic changes regularly and at random.
And seeing as this is a business blog, it should also probably be noted that kids who spend all their time developing MySpace accounts probably don’t jobs. No job, no money. No money, no market.
Just my two cents
~Puck~
Dave 05.22.07 at 7:36 pm
Goodriddance i say. I lost one of the best relationships last yr due to myspace bs. I hope it all goes down the crapper big time. All the hype can help it all go to hell.