MySpace stats & analysis
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Adriana Lukas's event notes
Many thanks to Adriana Lukas for blogging the notes from her talk at What MySpace Means on 21 June. Adriana is currently travelling around the US on business - and will be for several weeks - so I really appreciate her taking the time to sit down and process her discussion notes for the rest of us. Cheers, A!
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Heather Hopkins' What MySpace Means presentation
Many thanks to Hitwise UK‘s Director of Research, Heather Hopkins, for doing such a fabulous job at What MySpace Means of setting the scene for the rest of the day’s conversation. Heather gave us her most recent research data on MySpace and the social networking space in the UK, which gave a good foundations for the other presenters’ talks, which expanded from MySpace specifics and into other online community-related topics. She has now very kindly posted her presentation notes and charts for everyone on the web to see. Big thanks for that, too, Heather!
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Ready, set...
So tomorrow is when we will all finally gather in London, after weeks of blog posts, e-mail exchanges, and face-to-face conversations, to discuss what MySpace really means.
But the passing of this event will not mean the death of this blog. I have had several requests from those who can’t be with us tomorrow, from all over the world, to share the outcome of our conversations via the blog. This seems only right and proper. Life online means that no idea, thought, or expression is ever really ‘finished’ - not so long as someone else can find it, add to it, re-interpret it, or give it their own spin. Why should our event be any different?
I’m also pleased to say that MySpace’s senior vice president of marketing, Jamie Kantrowitz, will be joining us tomorrow, as will their VP of sales operations, Jay Stevens. So in addition to being able to exercise their right to reply in person, perhaps the MySpace gang can also give us their answer to the question: “So, what does MySpace really mean?”
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Observer observes social media
Today’s Observer has an in-depth look at social networking sites, with special attention on MySpace rival Bebo.
[Bebo founder Michael] Birch believes we are only at the beginning of things. Social networking sites ‘are becoming much more of a utility over time rather than being a pure gimmick’, he told the website Online Personals Watch. ‘They’re actually providing a genuine benefit. For example, Bebo is a cultural phenomenon in Ireland. A Beboer contacted us from Ireland and told us that before Bebo, the folks in his small town were not getting along. Then everyone independently joined Bebo, and got to know each other and now there’s a community spirit in the town pub that wasn’t there before.’ In other words, young people are exploiting the ideal way of communicating with each other: socially awkward and self-conscious in the real world, fluent in the online world.
There’s nothing new in this piece, but it is worth reading if you are still trying to wrap your head round the online social networking space.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Online space as real estate
Seamus McCauley of Virtual Economics on MySpace slapping SingleStat.us with a cease and desist letter:
MySpace is treating its network like real estate. Legally, eBay vs BiddersEdge shows us that this is something MySpace is perfectly entitled to do...As a digital media strategy, it is absurd. If people want to come onto your land to build you a house, the appropriate response is not a bigger fence.
It is also worth reading what Seamus has to say about the smuttier MySpace killers that have been appearing of late.
Friday, June 16, 2006
MySpace dealing in "bad karma"?
[I]f I’ve learned anything from covering companies, it’s that sending a cease and desist letter to a small, one-man startup is generally not going to work out the way you planned.
So says reporter, entrepreneur, and lawyer Michael Arrington, editor of the hugely popular TechCrunch, on MySpace’s nuking of SingleStat.us.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
MySpace working around users to get advertisers
MySpace is teaming with online job ads aggregator Simply Hired to bring MySpace Careers to its young users. Silicon Valley Web 2.0 tracker Mike Arrington, the guy whose blog every start-up in the world wants to star in, broke the news. (Link via Hitachi’s Jeremiah Owyang, with whom I had the pleasure of dining on Monday night at the home of business blogging author Shel Israel.)
Perhaps MySpace sees the creation of dedicated quasi-portals like this - which feature no actual user-generated content - as a way to attract advertisers who want nothing at all to do with the perceived risks of user-generated content. Can MySpace Travel and MySpace Finance be far behind?
Monday, June 12, 2006
Social networking meets hysterical 'news' reality show
I must admit that I was sucked completely into watching a special TV report here in the US about sexual predators on sites like MySpace. To prove the point that it’s not just people in big cities who go online (and who exactly was the target audience for this newsflash?), the producers of Dateline NBC went to my home state of Ohio in order to lure sexual predators into honeytraps. It was, as I expected, gripping television.
The producers and police offers had the help of an organisation called Perverted Justice, which specialises in using actresses as bait to help the authorities catch online sexual predators. While the group has come in for criticism from some, they can also claim to have weeded out a fair number of paedophiles.
Unfortunately, the piece was little more than propaganda which will help legislation to ban kids using blogs and social networking sites in public libraries and schools. It would have been laudable if NBC had given as much time to trying to understand what MySpace actually is - and how kids use it - as they did to throwing out hysterical statistics about how many kids do things online that they wouldn’t want their parents to know about. Indeed, they could have done with a look at social anthropoligist Danah Boyd’s claim that kids are safer on MySpace than paedophiles are, due to the large law enforcement presence on such sites. Instead, the show proved once more than the media - like politicians - are awfully keen to prescribe ‘solutions’ for problems that either do not exist or do not exist as they imagine they do.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
The MySpace user experience for Gen Xers
"When I closed the browser window, I just breathed a huge sigh of relief. It’s chaotic and stressful.”
So said a friend of mine recently in relating her experience of getting started with a MySpace profile. This friend is in her late 20s, which I’m sure had something to do with the perspective.
Monday, June 05, 2006
MySpace for non-dummy beginners
If you’re looking for a primer on sites like MySpace and Bebo and why they matter, you could do much worse than to read this interview with Danah Boyd, a cultural anthropologist at Berkeley who also works with Yahoo Research, and Henry Jenkins, co-director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. Danah - an expert in the digital lives of children who maintains that MySpace is now safer for kids than for sexual predators, due to the high level of law enforcement presence on the site - and Henry talk in-depth about the particular concerns of parents, legislators, and journalists over the possible threats posed by MySpace.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
MySpace serving malware?
Further to my surprise at MySpace’s use of interruptive pop-up ads, Sun Microsystems engineer (and all-around clever stick) Alec Muffet contacted me about his experience with ErrorSafe, the interrupting advertiser in question.
Conclusion: Not only is ErrorSafe serving pop-ups, but it is attempting to run executable files on users’ computers. This is about a million and one flavours of not cool and not acceptable. As Alec advises me, the best course of action is to have nothing to do with ErrorSafe, and to complain to those who host their adverts. That, lamentably, includes MySpace.
Monday, May 29, 2006
My MySpace experiment
As part of the preparation for next month’s event, this weekend I created my own MySpace profile. When I went back 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.
Friday, May 26, 2006
All about the Benjamins
Three Motley Fool analysts turn their gaze on MySpace - required reading if you’re interested in the money angle of social networking. (And if you’re not, well, how is life as a true original?)
Thursday, May 25, 2006
When emergent trends blow up business models
Adriana Cronin-Lukas, who will be speaking at our event next month (and who also sits on the Engagement Alliance advisory board), uses the social bookmarking tool Furl to flag up this FT piece on advertisers struggling to reach teens online. Upon reading it, Adriana comments:
I remember the arguments that just because some people can do things that bypass the media, a few of those individuals will not change anything… what the media industry forgets is that an emergent trend will not look the same when it undercuts and distorts their model. If it makes sense, someone will grab the oppportunity and turn it into a business. This is what MySpace has done and it’s certainly not the final word…
Emphasis mine. Definitely a point for discussion on June 21st.