MySpace Facts:
   

• MySpace is totally going crazy.
• MySpace now attracts more page views than both Hotmail and Google.
• MySpace is growing by more than 75,000 members a day.
• MySpace has gone from 0 to 27 million members in a just over two years.

Dave Karlotski, publisher of this newspaper, finds these MySpace facts unbelievable. “More page views than Google search? That doesn’t make sense.” Yet, it’s all true. MySpace is currently the fourth ranked Web domain in terms of page views, according to the often cited comScore MediaMetrix.
Sometimes something comes along that redefines an idea so well that it quickly feels like an in-dispensable part of culture: the Ipod, Flash, MySpace…

HISTORY
MySpace was founded in 2003 by a tiny, computer-savvy group of individuals in California. Co-creator Tom Anderson told friends about it, held huge MySpace parties, e-mailed everyone and made it happen. MySpace began to make money by selling ad banners strategically placed atop every page. These ads are seen by 27 million registered MySpace users. The majority of the users are 17 to 35 years old, the most highly sought-after demographic for advertisers. This helps keep MySpace free.
MySpace allows you to easily enjoy the technological thrills in which once only true “nerds” could delight. Basically it allows you to build your own multi-media enabled interactive Web page without needing to know even a single line of coding. KJ2k is an Alaskan DJ who confesses “I am an idiot, I type with one finger at a time. I wanted to build Web site but I had no idea how. I gave up. Now I have a MySpace page with well over 100 friends. 100 is a lot for Alaska. It’s freakin’ cold up here.”

Simply put, MySpace is an online community. It allows you to create a free online profile and home page which other MySpacers can see, featuring multiple photos, a bio, blogs, e-mail, interest-based groups (for example, “the bipolar express”), video clips, MP3s, your interests, favorite movies, TV shows, books and music. The page is all converted into HTML data which Web crawlers then index and search engines will link to. You can next create an online social network by simply clicking on photos of other users and adding them as friends.

Your first friend is MySpace co-creator Tom Anderson, and so it begins. What happens next? You will lose hours of sleep and hours of otherwise productive daylight, surfing through MySpace’s 26 million user profiles. You intend to quickly check your MySpace e-mail only to emerge hours later, head filled with random information from comments and blogs, eyes blurry with ghost images burned into your eyeballs from viewing tiny user profile jpegs.

You can get incredibly detailed in your travels through MySpace, using the search features to find other MySpacer friends and strangers with similar interests. For example, using the advanced filters, you could search for all 20 to 24 year olds within a 17-mile radius of Portsmouth who love Camembert cheese, have a high IQ, and think Karl Rove is a selfish slob who should be imprisoned for treason.

Think about the possibilities: for an artist/musician type or for starting a new business or just for trying to make friends, it’s a great networking and promotional tool. MySpace allows users to easily create and join groups based on anything they can dream up, like “the coast to coast a.m. weekend edition fans of Art Bell” group, which is a fantastic place for conspiracy theorists to meet and share their paranoid visions. Élan Trey, a professional literary publicist in New York, explains. “I spend hours a day searching through MySpace, finding groups that are based on similar interests to books that I’m promoting. I not only learn a lot about the target market I’m trying to reach but I can actually promote right to them. I was working on a book by an author who hates dogs and I found the group “Dogs-b-gone”—they were frothing at the mouth for the book.”

MySpace is so easy to customize, so easy to master, that simplicity is part of its charm.
Big, big companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have craved and tried to invent something like this for years. Every other week someone was claiming that their new site was, “the cool place to be” on the Web, hoping for people to visit, hang out, chat and most importantly, look at ads. Friendster, LiveJournal, Meet-Up and Make Out Club are some of the more popular rivals. Facebook is another strong competitor that’s making a big splash right now, but it’s more closed to outsiders. You have to be part of a school that is registered with Facebook.

MySpace injected a sense of fun into online socialization. They make it simple for users to decorate their profile pages, and decorate they do, with bizarre, often half-naked, photos, animated GIFs, crazy fonts, songs... whatever they feel like. MySpace feels more like a party than anything else.
What about the technology? How exactly does MySpace work? It is actually quite simple: MySpace is magic.

Michael Phillips (Sparky) is an avid MySpace user. He tried to explain the technology behind MySpace and wound up just expounding its virtues. “There have been countless other networking Web sites out there that established themselves as online communities with like-minded individuals seeking to meet the same. MakeOutClub had the most impact and recognition within the underground scene of hipster doofuses and scenesters in the late ’90s and into the first years of this decade. I think I still have a profile on there, haven’t touched it since I joined MySpace. MOC is weak and unuser friendly compared to what MySpace has been able to do for anyone wanting to get themselves known on the WWW.”

REALITY VS. MYSPACE

Last month I got a MySpace e-mail from Sparky about a show in Boston. He learned about the show through a MySpace bulletin posted from the band’s own MySpace ID. We listened to their MP3s and contacted the band to get free tickets to the show, all through MySpace. We drove to the show in a real car. We got to the show and sat down next to two strangers. After a few minutes, one of the “strangers” asked Sparky if he was S. S. Cockrock. (That is his disturbing MySpace profile name.) Sparky replied, “I thought you looked familiar, your profile has your face superimposed over Wonder Woman’s body, right? You’re katethewave.”

MySpace makes everyone a superstar.

After spending the first half of the day on MySpace, then going out and seeing the faces of MySpace people around town, it’s like the real world and your computer world are starting to meld. Where does MySpace end and reality begin?

Jason Scornia is a puppeteer in Boston. He just gives up. “I wish I could just live in MySpace. I have more friends there.”

Twenty-nine-year-old photographer Lisa Murphy says “I’m a lurker. In some ways MySpace is more real than parties or shows or other ways you meet people, because I’ve read their blogs so I know about their sex life or mental problems or that their marriage is failing, but I don’t know if they know that I know, when we meet, and I feel sleazy and slink away.”

Sparky says he thinks it’s the other way around. “My reality is now very MySpace-based but not completely controlling my life. It’s always alarming for a die-hard MySpacer to find out that a real-life friend hasn’t whored themselves out to the masses and almost immediately a conversation is sparked about MySpace. MySpace is the Web site where you can find people and bands that interest you, and everyday life and human interaction is the reality where these people and bands become tangible.”
It’s clear that Sparky has a problem.

“I have an account just for friends where I usually just promote the shows I put on (myspace.com/nowhero). I have another account for the bands I’ve been working with to put on shows. (myspace.com/gosparky). I have another account just for the radio show I do on WUNH 91.3, Locality, on Saturdays 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. (myspace.com/local603). I’m not sure what’s going on with that one just yet. I might use that new “manage calendar” feature and post shows happening in the area.”
Perhaps he loves MySpace because it is such a useful promotional tool, but I suspect the real reason he is such a zealot lies in the fact that he met his girlfriend, Anne, through MySpace.

Anne: “He was friends with my friends, he appeared on their profiles in their lists. I thought his name was funny, and shot him a message—”

Sparky: “—and the rest is a very nice history.”

With all the searching features and filters, it is indeed a great way meet people, yet there are those who just do not like the idea of computerized friend making or dating. Portsmouth boutique operator Rachel Johnson explains. “It kind of makes my skin crawl actually to go out to make new friends. I like to discover new friends on a smaller scale … find them in bushes, maybe. MySpace is too large a scale. One serving is appetizing. Fifty is upsetting! It’s no longer food. It’s revolting. I don’t go about making friends on a fifty thousand million scale. If you’re swimming, a few salamanders are fine. A whole lake of them is a little bit creepy!”

Matt Jasper, 38, a consultant, is a bit overwhelmed with the astounding social-networking powers of MySpace. “It was the harbinger of my divorce. My then-wife suggested being polyamorous, and that’s when I opened my account. I looked forward to being a cyber-swinger and did so by posting poems I’d published in pretentious literary magazines. And sure enough, along came an M.A. student from UNH, a poetry babe. She was in my arms within a fortnight. I felt like I was dreaming the entire time. I felt like I was too slow to keep up with all the changes in my life. There was a complete sense of unreality. She may as well have been computer generated. I may as well, too.”

As a marketing tool, it’s fantastic. Songstress/promoter Laurel Brauns, who runs the Hush Hush Sweet Harlot music series at the Red Door (like most musician/artist types she has a number of other jobs and titles), has a love/hate relationship with MySpace.

“As far as music marketing goes, I think MySpace is a fantastic tool.”

See, I told you it was a Fantastic Marketing Tool.

However, she has her hesitations, too. “My main gripe with MySpace is that I spend enough time every day on this fucking computer already. I run my own business, which requires staring at this screen and e-mailing and calling about eight hours a day. But you can definitely create quite a buzz with virtual friends. That’s where I find it useful, and I actually have a site, my manager set it up for me: myspace.com/laurelbrauns. Come be my virtual friend. It works great for bands that are touring and playing in a random town where no one knows them, suddenly all these MySpace nerds might show up at your show!  And maybe they will meet another MySpace nerd and fall madly in love and live a happy life outside of cyberspace. Isn’t that all we want, a happy ‘real’ life?”

The FUTURE of MySpace

News Corp., the Right-Wing Media conglomerate that already owns the Republican marketing machine known as Fox News, just spent $580 million to buy MySpace. They know it’s big business. How will this affect the future of MySpace and reality?

MySpacer Rick Webb prophesies dire consequences. “Fox will kill MySpace, no doubt about it. I give them one year. It’ll wither on the vine. I also think someone else will just create a new MySpace-like networking tool which will become the next big thing.”

I, for one, will never leave! They’ll have to pry MySpace from my cold dead hands.