Comments on: MySpace Wins Social Media War Games

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 17:34:02 +0000

I concur with Brian on the age analysis. Danah Boyd’s the person to go to on this and she accounts for the higher age being partly down to concerned parents that sign in. But checking in to see that your 12 year old isn’t regularly chatting to any heavy set guys is not quite the same as being a user.

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 09:56:15 +0000

I think this is where intuition outweighs booksmarts. Where academia is probably going to be wrong.

For one, most people I know using MySpace are in there messin around. Updating their profile with goofy stuff, pics, videos, skins, music, etc. Or trying to build up their friends, supporting a band or something. Or commenting on others spaces or something. Depending on what MySpace pushes through there, I don’t think much of it will fare well unless it’s related to the above.

Also, Andy with regards to your comment
“MySpace has, in actuality, the oldest group of members; over 50 percent of their membership is over 35.”

I made a comment on this blog earlier about the many MySpace youngsters… and I think a lot of others had the same assumptions.

I still believe if you had a tiny statistician in you, and you ran a cross tab… and you put age on one axis and hours spent per week on another, truly interacting with the system and not trying to market products/services, I think my assumptions about MySpace are still true.

Also I question how valid those demographics numbers are. Go into MySpace right now and run a People Search on John Smith. #2 and #3 in the results for me include (2) 107 year old females. How can you trust numbers when they include at least a few radical outliers like that? Also the cluttered interface. And I guess some error messages according to Tyler.

By: Jordan McCollum

Jordan McCollum — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:20:18 +0000

Me neither. In fact, I haven’t even spent enough time on MySpace to get an error message.

Maybe we should call it “TheirSpace.”

By: Tyler Banfield

Tyler Banfield — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:17:36 +0000

I guess I just don’t get MySpace (well, except from the marketing side of things). I don’t see how people can spend so much time on a web site that is coded so poorly and has an error message every three minutes.