At the MIX06 conference, some of the top guys from MySpace were on stage to talk about how the Microsoft platform allowed them to scale better than what they were using before. Everyone in the audience recognized how huge a force MySpace had become, but nobody I met was actually an active MySpace user. I thought that given their huge size (number 2 in page views on the Internet, according to some) I had better sign up and try it out for myself.
I had browsed on some MySpace pages before, but never for very long. Like most techno-geeks, I cringe at the horrible page design that most users have adopted, and I have a bit of a bias against social networking sites in general (although I have picked up my LinkedIn usage as of late). So over the weekend, I signed up for an account. My username: alanlewis0. Here is my super-cool profile:
The signup experience went fine, and I think it is cool that every user gets one friend when they sign up - Tom, one of the MySpace founders. Once my profile was filled out, I tried using the GMail contact list import to see if any of them were MySpace users. Nope. (I thought it was a more than a bit of a security risk that they ask for your GMail username and password to get the contact list, but I decided to take that risk) Then I tried searching for a few of my eBay co-workers to see if they were on the site. Nope.
I finally hit on something when I searched on fellow high school alumni who graduated the same year that I did. There were about 40 fellow Mitty Monarchs listed, about 25 of whom I could identify by name based on their profile. I added a couple of them as friends and sent a MySpace email to one of them whom I hadn't seen in a long time. Turns out she has been working at Yahoo for six years and is currently living in the UK. Cool - now I'm looking forward to catching up with her at our 10 year reunion this summer. But after this I felt I had run out of things to do. I tried doing a search on my college graduating class, but the result set was so huge that I could only find a couple of people that I had even heard of by name.
Here are 2 random observations:
- The fact that the search is so bad probably increases the page views on MySpace dramatically. You can't do things like search for everyone named "Greg" who graduated from UCSB in 2000. Instead, you have to page through profile after profile to find who you are looking for. Of course for most people I'm guessing that what they like to do on MySpace is look at profile after profile.
- Although MySpace pages are in general horribly designed, I found that the band pages tended to be more consistent and useful than the typical band websites, which are usually Flash nightmares
Since I'm not using the site to cruise for dates, I'm not finding much of anything that's useful or interesting for me on the site. There does seem to be lots of music content via various band pages, which I had heard is one of the big MySpace draws, but I'm happy just using iTunes.
I'll be exploring MySpace more over the coming weeks. I'd love to chat with some heavy users so I can learn what people like. Add me as a friend and drop me a line!
