Abe says, in reference to this:
It’s funny to read the tech types on this stuff cause they just don’t get culture. Sure the Facebook app platform is light years ahead of what MySpace is doing, but it doesn’t exactly help you promote your band or your photo studio or your art does it? I’m actually more optimistic about MySpace’s long term relevance now than I’ve ever been. That doesn’t mean what Facebook is doing isn’t cool and potentially important, it’s just a big fork in the paths these companies are taking.
I can’t help but think though that what Abe sees as Myspace’s strength – promoting your band or photo studio or whatever – is actually its weakness. Myspace is basically a big spam machine. Although I still spend more time on Myspace, as that’s where most of my friends are, I’ve been spending less and less time on it and so has everyone else I know. My Facebook network, meanwhile, is continuing to grow. The thing is, Facebook is designed to actually facilitate communication between users. Myspace is designed to get people to accept spam.
If Myspace continues to wall its gates, it becomes even less useful. Doing even the most basic tasks in Myspace – from sending messages to uploading pictures – is painfully slow and unreliable. A flood of bulletins from bands and businesses and never ceasing friend requests from cam girls have no real value to me. Putting a funny You Tube video or Photobucket pic on a friend’s comments is one of the fun things about Myspace, and if I can’t do that, then what’s the point?
June 18, 2007 at 2:30 pm
heh, that’s where I thought myspace was going last year, drowning in it’s own self generated spam. Still might happen, but it has a few things going for it. One is the networks themselves. It’s hard to regenerate those things, Friendster had a long ass exodus, yet it still stabilized to a core set of networks that had invested too much in it to move elsewhere. The other is the “my” part, it might be an ass backwards process, but you can really own your myspace page visually in a way that facebook’s squeaky clean design just won’t allow. I’m seeing more and more bands and photographer’s who have their own urls that basically just point to their myspace page… And sometimes it’ll take a while before you can even tell the page you land on is actually a myspace…