I heard an ad on Ancient Faith Radio for an Orthodox MySpace. Interesting. If you’re Orthodox and want to enter into an online community of Eastern Orthodox Christian visit the Orthodox Circle.
Pilgrim Notes
Reflections along the way.
Tag: MySpace
Every week I sign up for a new social networking site just to explore their features and see what’s out there. With so many socialnet sites, I lose track of what I’ve joined, and I usually never do much with many of them. I signed up with Flixster on Wednesday and wasn’t sure if I’d use it much or not. Flixster may turn out to be a useful site. It is definitely like Netflix’s Friends feature combined with MySpace. The nice thing is that users can simply rate movies; they don’t have to sign up for a rental plan. This makes it easy to build a larger friends database and connect with a variety of people who like movies. And for someone like me who prefers to hear movie recommendations from other people, I find this very appealing.
If Netflix was smart, they’d follow Flixster lead and offer an expanded version of the Friends feature with no requirement to join. Of course, once people enter into a network and come to visit their movie page, it would be easier to encourage them to sign up for a plan, download a film or buy a film.
It’s official, Web Pages are dead. Bryan Eisenberg offers a touching eulogy to the that once great paragon of Internet traffic. He writes,
The Web page was pronounced dead on October 9, 2006, after a long bought with chronic irrelevance. A large group of marketers attempted CPR and other heroic resuscitation techniques. Witnesses present at the scene told reporters that despite a few minutes of chaos, the Web page’s last moments were largely serene and peaceful.
There is talk of a MySpace Web Pages Memorial Group forming, and some web pages aficionados are gathering “on a hillside” at Second Life to comfort one another. The rest of us are just blogging it.
Micahel Calore, Wired News Online, recently asked readers for the best and worst of Web 2.0. Yesterday, he posted responses. Worst? MySpace. Sure it’s the most popular, but it’s also the ugliest and doesn’t want to play with other Web 2.0 apps. Here’s the rest of his list:
Best Top 5
Flickr (I likee.)
Odeo (I need to play around podcasting at some point.)
Writely (I personally like ThinkFree better)
del.icio.us (it is just me or is that hard to type?)
NetVibes (This is one of my faves!)
Worst
MySpace
Squidoo
Browzar
Fo.rtuito.us
Friendster
Trying to keep out open source invaders, MySpace has decided to erect walls around its interface, claiming YouTube, Flickr and others are simply leeches on the MySpace body. Or as Peter Chernin says,
“If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace.”
It appears MySpace is going to make their space less friendly to outside companies by blocking external links in flash widgets and more. They also plan to develop proprietary widgets for video and other services.
As TechCrunch says, “It sounds like MySpace’s owners may not want to play a game where everyone wins.”
Too bad. We’ll see what happens. Maybe MySpace won’t take their ball go home. And if they do, hopefully someone will come and play even better ball than before.
iVillage, once the very example of websites dedicated to women, is now a perfect example of Web 1.0 thinking. Originally built around message boards, the site limits the amount of user input and customization. While the technology can easily be modified, can the administrative thinking behind the site change? can it go from a site with highly managed content to a free-wheeling customer content driven site?
NBC bought iVillage in March, Bob Wright, NBC President, recently announced that they plan to make iVillage the foundational pattern for NBCs digital efforts. Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch offers a wonderful comparison and analysis of MySpace vs iVillage and the challenges ahead for NBC.
MySpace is as close to a democratic virtual world as you can get on the Web, as its own liberating culture and subcultures allow for new talent to rise from the virtual pool of wannabes. To wit: MySpace recently struck a deal with SNOCAP so that the 3 million bands on MySpace can sell their music to their fans directly.
Ten-year-old iVillage, on the other hand, is a first-generation Internet community site, built on an earlier top-down model of what community meant to those of us who were around back in the old days of the Web — message boards. IVillage has 1,000 message boards. But they are so limiting that the only way to demonstrate self-expression, besides writing in all caps and using expletives, is to upload a photo. Additionally, iVillage is a place where news is delivered to you; where editors rule the roost; where the audience learns and takes more than they give, and where the bulk of the content is polished and scrubbed. It’s almost too perfectly maintained compared to the anarchy, mess and grunge of MySpace.
The differences remind me of my walk through the Sausalito, Calif. Art Festival a couple weeks ago. As I made my way through the very clean, organized and civil art show, I couldn’t help but think of my friends who were — at that same time — attending the raucous, eclectic and countercultural art festival called Burning Man. The two environments couldn’t be more different. One liberates our individuality, like MySpace. The other quietly asks us to conform, like iVillage.
Looks like MySpace is entering the music download world. Soon they’ll be offering bands on MySpace the opportunity to sell their music downloads at whatever prices the bands decide (MySpace will charge bands a distribution fee).
By the end of the year, Mr. DeWolfe said, MySpace will offer independent bands that have not signed with a record label a chance to sell their music on the site. MySpace says it has nearly three million bands showcasing their music.
Songs can be sold on the bands’ MySpace pages and on fan pages, in MP3 digital file format, which works on most digital players including Apple’s market-dominating iPod. (New York Times)
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