Getting to Know MySpace
Posted on April 25th, 2006by Michael Gray in Case Study, SEO
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While I’ve only been playing with MySpace for a few weeks and I’m no expert, having gone through a lot of it I’ve prepared a little primer that can help get you up to speed and understand how MySpace works. Hopefully my newness puts me in the same boat as other newbies who will have the same questions I did. So if you’re ready let’s dive on in …
For those of us who’ve been online for a few years or more MySpace probably sounds a lot like Orkut which is a miserable failure with everyone except Brazilians, drug dealers and terrorists. To some extent it’s not a bad comparison, but MySpace is a lot of things Orkut isn’t. Firstly Orkut developed thousands and thousands of little clusters of niche groups. While there are groups on MySpace much of it’s popularity comes from interactions with a masses of people developing “friends”. The term “friends” in MySpace has only the loosest correlation to “friends” IRL (in real life). While some people only have “friends” that are people they know, many of the MySpace users have hundreds and sometimes thousands of friends. In fact having more friends is something a lot of people strive for. Why would you want to be friends with in extreme cases over 20,000 people? In a word to spam, but lets take a step back. When you grant someone friend status you give them two things, first the ability to leave comments on your profile, and second the ability to send bulletins to you. Just like forums and blogs there are legitimate conversations and comments, however there are also a large number of “comment spammers” in MySpace. If you’re a UCE spammer well you’re just going to love bulletins. Create a bulletin and it get sent out to all of your friends. If you have 20,000 friends that’s 20,000 bulletins, and we all know spamming is just a numbers game.
Now don’t get the wrong impression that MySpace is just a mosh pit where you’re going to have to wade through spammers stacked waist deep. If you stay in your small little sphere of “trusted friends” you probably won’t have much of a problem. However once you start accepting “friends” from the wrong side of town, well you’ll see what I mean. Let’s also remember spam is a relative thing, for example if you’re in band, are a DJ, are a spokes model or something similar, and are sending out a bulletin alerting people to where you’ll be and what event you’ll be working, it isn’t spam to me, but others may feel differently.
OK enough talking about it let’s get into it. Signing up for MySpace is fairly painless, you don’t need an invite just go to MySpace.com and click the orange button on the right hand side that says sign up. Fill out some basic profile info and give away as much personal information as you’re comfortable with. Now one of the things they don’t explain too well is you can enter CSS info into some of the fields and overwrite the stylesheet for your profile. Once you start cruising around you’ll start seeing some wild stuff people have done. To be honest 90% of it is eye-bleedingly awful. Most people have no concept of usability or color scheming, so giving HTML/CSS to the great unwashed masses makes for an exceptionally visually painful user experience. There are all sorts of people who have HTML/CSS generators and there is a whole little cottage industry forming around My Space. I’d suggest leaving your profile styling alone for a little while until you see examples of profiles you like. If you know some people on MySpace you’re going to want to add them as friends, which is pretty easy, just go to their profile (here’s mine) and look for the “add to friends” link.
Depending on how much someone has modified their styles it could look completely different and be anywhere on the page, but it’s usually on the left. You’ll get a confirmation screen asking if you want to be this persons friend and if you accept it fires off an email to that person. If they accept congrats you’re now friends and can comment on each other pictures, videos, profiles and blog. Included with each profile is a blog, personally I’d never build my primary blog on a domain I didn’t own, but thats me, however as a secondary blog it has some uses. Every time you make a blog posting it will send a notification to all of your friends you’ve made an update. You can also reach friends by sending out messages or bulletins. Messages go only to one person and are on their profile.
Bulletins go to all your “friends” and are sent on your control panel.
In my opinion this is one of the most useful and most abused features of MySpace, basically it allows anyone to become an email spammer to their “friends”. One of the things you’re likely to encounter is a “friendship drive”. They come with different names like “picture bus”, “picture train” or “myspace whoring” but what they are designed to do is to increase people’s “friends” count.
You agree to add some “friends” and repost the message, spamming all of your friends on their behalf. While you will get some friends out of the deal, but plain and simple you are getting used. Most of the people who become your friends are shill accounts (more about that later). Now don’t get the impression myspace is just an email spammers paradise, that’s not the case, but it is something you have to be careful of, and newbies often fall victim to.
The Experiment
Because I’m a tinkerer I conducted some experiments to see how many friends I could get with different approaches. I created three fictional shill accounts. Now while I’m not a woman, I’m getting pretty good at playing one on the internet (Blogging for Attention) and guys are just easier to scam (see Pretty women scramble men’s ability to assess the future) and would help me reach my conclusion much quicker.
Woman 1: Went out and searched for “real men” to become friends with
Woman 2: Accepted all “friendship drive” emails
Woman 3: Waited passively for “friends” to find her
After 14 days here are the unscientific results
Woman 1: 90 friends (mostly male)
Woman 2: 300+ friends (mostly female)
Woman 3: 5 friends (all male)
Now while I’m very skeptical of the data people enter about themselves online ( see Will the Real Online Demographics Please Stand Up ) it’s my opinion that the “friend list” of woman 1 is a higher quality list. Even though it’s less than 30% of the size of woman #2’s list I think woman #2 has a high percentage of shills who are friends. While you will have some difficulty getting a guy to “buy what you’re selling”, shills are never going to buy anything, so it’s something to consider.
So we’ve taken a high level view of MySpace and how it works, and touched on some spam techniques you are likely to encounter, IMHO MySpace has some attractive things to offer as far a s marketing opportunities. There are legitimate organizations using MySpace ansd we’ll look at some in Part II, Marketing Examples on My Space.
UPDATE:
Blog notifications are only sent to your friends if they have subscribed to your blog. Additionally you don’t have to be someone’s friend to subscribe to their blog. Thanks to Irish Wonder.
April 25th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
Timely post, thanks. I have been playing with MySpace as well. I read today that perhaps it was designed to be counter-intuitive on purpose to generate more page views. Yesterday I read that as bad as it is nothing will ever catch it because of its huge base of users. TagWorld is the other network that I have played with.
April 25th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
Myspace sucks dude, I am amazed that it could hold your attention for this long!
Visiting myspace makes me hate people.
April 25th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
very interesting, although I wasn’t sure what a “shill” account is?
April 25th, 2006 at 9:21 pm
A fake person who encourages you to sign up for another service or to buy a product
April 25th, 2006 at 9:22 pm
Aaron I’m totally into the psychology of it … I find it fascinating
April 27th, 2006 at 5:11 pm
Thanks! This is great stuff!
December 20th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
I really liked your article. I for one vowed never to enter the world of myspace, however, my friends and co-workers convinced me that it would work well to promote my web site.
It has helped a little and I am able to find people who are interested in our family friendly cartoons with out a whole lot of work. I don’t spam, exactly, I just let everyone know when new cartoons are coming.
I’m glad you mentioned about the shills, because I want a lot of people watching our work and shills won’t do that, so I’ll try to avoid them.
Thanks!
July 19th, 2007 at 12:10 am
I recently noticed that when doing a name search for my Myspace account that my account information had been moved to the very last page of a long list of references to my account. I want to get it back at the top where it belongs but don’t know how to do that.
Thanks,
Joyce