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.