Well Dang, Myspace

Posted by Erik

August 7, 2008

A little over three years ago I decided it would be neat to create my own personal page on this nifty website called MySpace. It seemed to be pretty popular and it was certainly growing quickly. I was able to create an account as a “band” and upload music to my page. People were writing messages and commenting on my photos. Even though these technologies were not a foreign concept to me, being in the web industry, I found the site a nice resource to share with friends.

Unfortunately MySpace because more of a monster than anything. It was a hotspot for hackers and security exploiters and quickly gained a poor reputation for that. On the flip side the advertising was going crazy and it was sold for $540 million to News Corp. I became less and less interested in the service as the years passed. I don’t frequent the site by any means but today I decided “hey, why not sign in for old time’s sake”. Upon going to myspace.com this evening I was disgusted

Since it’s early days MySpace has added numerous features. One very popular one, needed to combat similar services such as YouTube and Vimeo, is MySpace TV. On the homepage there are currently ‘popular videos’ that are supposed to grab your attention and gain your interest. Tonight this popular video was titled “Cindy and Heidi Bare All” with a caption of “Cindy Crawford and Heidi Klum TOPLESS!”. Let me first say that this is a TMZ produced video with the black censor bars over certain areas of the body. From what I understand TMZ now has a TV show so my assumption is that the video is a clip from the show.

MySpace, like cable television, seems to be allowing more and more as time goes by. It makes me quite angry to see that videos like that have made it not only to MySpace but to the homepage. Jeremiah Owyang (Sr Analyst at Forrester Research) notes that “85% of MySpace users are of voting age (18 or older)”. This I find hard to believe due to the fact that this number is assuming that everyone on MySpace is truthful about their age. For the sake of this entry I will assume that this number is correct, however. He also notes that “MySpace has more than 110 million monthly active users around the globe”. This would mean that 16.5 million MySpace members are under 18. That makes the video’s homepage presence that much more aggravating.

I have no clue what the “web” will be like when my child is growing up but I do know that I’ll keep things monitored like any good parent would (thanks, Dad ). I can’t imagine what will pass as “acceptable” in a decade. Only time will tell.