Wired writers must be on fire – Michael Calore has a great post up on the companies that are winning and losing the transition to a web 2.0 audience. Of course, it may just be that we share the same opinion of MySpace, but overall I use all of his top picks and I’ve dissed all his bottom five picks.
What’s my gripe with MySpace? It’s garish, superficial and those autoplay music things make me batty. I am already getting junk mail from the shadier element of Internet marketers pushing it as the next great marketplace, and it’s already full of blinking and shimmering ads. I don’t need to be friends with robots, thanks – I prefer interacting with real people. That said, yes, I have a MySpace page, mostly so I retain my name there, but also to monitor the climate and effectiveness.
What I’m seeing so far is that friends there translate into connections and ideas within networks, not necessarily buyers or voters. If you’re sold on the idea of automating your contact with the teeming masses at MySpace, you’re going to have to work really hard generating value out of it. As with most things, what you put into it is what you’ll get out of it.
MySpace has reached the point where people are there because everyone else is. That isn’t necessarily a good reason to be there, unless you have a clear goal and purpose to include it as a component of your online marketing tactics. Assuming a page and automated friends will fund your retirement is a slow road to sorrow.
Update: Barbarian over at Forever Geek has posted Debunking the MySpace Myth of 100 Million Users that is well worth a read. Since almost everyone I know on MySpace has at least two accounts (one for their project, another for themselves) I tend to agree with his numbers.
