The most ’social’ site on the internet is catching flack these days for all of the wront reasons. Virtually everyday you hear stories about how MySpace is putting kids at risk to sexual predators. Sure that may happen, but that happens everywhere, malls, schools, concerts, jobs, etc.
I have been on a kick lately about closed community silos. MySpace is one of the worst offenders these days, but it is no different from BlackPlanet or CollegeClub. That is why MySpace is doomed. Everyone is wanting to copy MySpace, but MySpace just copied technology for 1998. I am fully convinced that MySpace will end up getting it’s ass kicked by open communities that interoperate. Marc Canter has a post about this today:
MySpace is the new Friendster - the closed, old school data silo which we’re all jealous of. Me - I joined back when they had 100k members and Tom actually responded to emails. So let’s remember how MySpace prospered.
- Music
- Sex
- Throwing raves (which connects the two together.)
That’s why I always pitch new kinds of roadshows to our clients - as it’s where cyberspace meets meatspace. Now you have an idea of how badly MeetUp fucked up.
he also hints at AOL entering the fray and that AIM will be involved. Speaking of online silos, did AOL open up AIM yet? Isn’t it supposed to work with GoogleTalk soon?
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Problem is, MySpace is becoming such a necessary component of music networking, and it’s not nearly up to the task. When I was first invited to join MySpace a year or so ago, I took one look at it and said “no thanks.” I couldn’t imagine spending time on a site with such a primitive design and which gave such a sense of being dominated by 13-year-old social skills.
Now I’ve relented and have been using MySpace for a few months, but I still hate it and wish someone would come up with something better specifically geared to the music industry. The business of trying to manage contacts, events, and so on through such a clunky interface is truly painful. I wish every day for something better.
I work in IT at a high school. Therefore, I work closely with parents who are at wit’s end with their fourteen- and fifteen-year-old kids using MySpace to (among other things):
* post WAY too much personal information (ie, full name, address, etc.) about themselves and their families on the site
* post revealing pictures of themselves with/without their friends
* engage in online “popularity contests” and character assassinate schoolmates
Those first two bullet points are extremely ripe fodder for online predators, as any reasonably intelligent person can plainly see.
Yes, I know musicians who rely upon MySpace for exposure, and I know artists and small business owners who sell their wares on that site. But for K-12 kids. NO freakin way.
Thanks,
Tim
I used to work in IT at a high school in Washington, DC. At the time we had very similar issues with BlackPlanet.com. over 90% of the kids in the school had Black Planet pages and it was the same kind of information. There are also the pictures (BlackPlanet and MySpace). These kids post pictures that often border on pornography.
I don’t want to discount the possibility of online predators, but this is not a new problem nor is it one that is specific to MySpace, and I don’t think it is specific to online communities either.
I heard someone dub it the MySpace Witch Hunt of ‘06 the other day.
Tim, have you considered blocking access to MySpace from the school network? I considered doing that with BlackPlanet.
Yeah, we have myspace.com, facebook.com, and xanga.com blocked on our campus. However, it didn’t take the kiddies long to discover the plethora of proxy servers (and proxy server list sites) on the Web. Thus, it has been an ongoing fox and hound chase locating those sites and adding them to our blacklists on our content filtering appliance.
T
[…] Yeah, I know—this post title probably takes the cake as the most bizarre you have seen in the past hour, correct? Heh. Anyway, an article posted by Jackson the other day sparked my interest because I work as an IT director at a high school in Nashville, so the subject of adolescents and the MySpace.com online community comes up in my work life on a daily basis. Let me explain. […]
i think myspace is great