The BIG Success With Myspace

In little more than a couple of years MySpace.com has gone from zero to being a top five website which no self-respecting US teenager can ignore. Now, it's gaining ground in Britain.

As any creative thinker knows the best ideas are always the most obvious. The rise of MySpace.com from nowhere to almost the top of the internet tree in just 36 months does nothing to change that maxim.

MySpace is simplicity itself - a site that enables anyone to build their own homepage for free, listing their likes, dislikes, favourite bands, top books, best movies, general interests, relationship status etc, and then hook-up with other like-minded folk.

As 25-year-old Briana Dougherty, a MySpace devotee, puts it, "it's a casual way to stay in contact without appearing weird".

When Briana, who works in the music industry, hits the town, goes to a gig or a party and meets someone interesting, they trade MySpace profiles and stay in contact.



It's a central meeting point to stay in contact with friends all the time
MySpace user Briana Dougherty
Asking for someone's e-mail address can be "creepy", says Briana, who is from California and works in London, because it's "personal, one-to-one contact".

She has 224 "friends" on MySpace. Some are good friends from back home in the US, some are just people "you occasionally see around parties" and some are not actually individuals, but bands she likes.

Music, always a lively topic of conversation among the young, is a great common denominator on MySpace, and fertile ground for emerging bands - the Arctic Monkeys' owe much of their success to the site.

These days the time-honoured teenage conversational gambit "What music are you into?" will likely be met with a response along the lines of "Can I refer you to my MySpace page."

MySpace is what's known as a social networking site. It's by far the biggest, claiming about 57 million registered users, and is currently ranked the fifth most popular English language site on the net by the Alexa ratings service. Others of the same genre include Facebook, Bebo, MSN Spaces, Friendster and Yahoo 360.


The new man behind MySpace - media mogul Rupert Murdoch
All work in a similar way, offering users a host of conventional internet functions - blogging, user forums, instant messaging, personal profiles, online photo albums, visitor comment spaces - in one place.

See someone who's into the same music as you, similar films, is a compatible star sign, or you just fancy? Send them a message and if they're interested, bingo, you've made a friend. Although MySpace wouldn't confirm its UK audience, it has been cited at between two and four million. The launch of a UK-specific site is thought to be imminent.

The success of MySpace has not gone unnoticed by commercial operators who have seized on it as a handy way of targeting potential customers. For example, anyone who proclaims their interest in kite-surfing, should steel themselves for a torrent of e-mails from companies trying to sell them the latest kit.

And with millions of users, social networking sites, which make money out of advertising, are potential goldmines. MySpace was bought last year by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580m (£332.85m).

But while Mr Murdoch, 75 this week, is clearly hip to the appeal of MySpace, many people even half his age will never have heard of it.


DANGERS OF NETWORKING SITES

The safety of people, particularly children and women, using MySpace is a growing concern
Rachel O'Connell, who leads the Home Office taskforce on internet safety, is anxious that pages are so easily searchable
Displaying photos of oneself helps stalkers, she says
MySpace's Chris DeWolfe says 'This isn't a MySpace issue, it's an internet issue'
"The appeal of these sites lies in the crucial part of the adolescent socialisation process which we all go through... finding your identity, voice, place and status - the tribe with which you most identify," says Jo Twist, senior research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research.

The ideas behind these sites are not new, says Dr Twist, but what is characterising the trend now is the "ease with which people can upload and share their own 'digital assets' - motifs that say something about who they are."

Some parents will doubtless gaze at their offspring busily cultivating friendships online - rather than in the real world - with an air of despair. But, says Dr Twist, it can be hard for them to understand because "many of us have our social networks in place".

The ease with which relationships can be forged online is changing the nature of friendship too. After all, how common is it to have upwards of 200 friends?

MySpace user Stella Sims, 26, sees a clear, but unspoken, competitive streak among users.

"It's a place to show off your personality and how many friends you have. It's a bit of statement of how popular you are," says Stella.


The site is said to have 57 million registered users
Any philosopher or psychologist will tell you that close friendships with more half-a-dozen people is not possible, says Mark Vernon, author of the Philosophy of Friendship.

MySpace friendships are more akin to "audience reach... like Richard and Judy" than traditional social reach.

"Friendship takes time to develop. The person who says they have hundreds of friends wants our compassion not our envy. The heart of friendship is wanting to know someone and be known by them. This is not the same as knowing about someone which is what you get if you never meet your online pal face to face."

Some will find the idea of setting out one's personal life to a potential audience of millions perplexing. Yet MySpace users show little sign of being intimidated by their extensive friendship networks, or indeed by the inevitable threat posed by dishonest, even predatory, users.

Despite a spate of paedophiles and stalkers targeting the site - two men were charged in the US on Tuesday with assaulting girls they met on MySpace - most users simply ignore unwanted communications, according to a recent academic study in the US.

Perhaps the biggest headache anyone with a couple of hundred mates needs to get their head around is how to manage their Christmas card list.

Social Networking

While the influence of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace on firms’ sales and marketing initiatives continues to grow, some experts predict that their impact will soon be dwarfed by that of another Web 2.0 technology - ­ virtual worlds.

Online virtual worlds geared towards entertainment are commonplace nowadays, the
best known being Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, MindArk’s Entropia Universe and Linden Labs Second Life. Users are immersed in an online three-dimensional interactive environment where their characters ­ - usually known as avatars ­ - can get up to just about anything. The fact that life in these virtual worlds often revolves around money, which in some cases can be converted to and from real currency in the physical world, is obviously enticing to businesses.

Ways in which enterprises might use virtual worlds for everyday business range from setting up a virtual meeting place to aid employee collaboration, to a business-to-consumer model where firms maintain a virtual store selling items that are delivered in the real world.

Quocirca principal analyst Fran Howarth is a firm believer in the promise that virtual worlds hold for enterprises. “These worlds have huge potential in terms of the ability to build brand awareness and do PR in the web site’s community and, in some cases, to sell or advertise products to potential customers,” she said.

Topics under discussion at the recent Virtual Worlds 2008 conference in New York reflected the growing interest enterprises are showing in virtual worlds. For example, the theme of one of the best-attended sessions was the need for virtual world developers to focus more on promoting the business benefits of their technology.

Gartner fellow and vice president Steve Prentice believes the past six months have seen a surge in interest from enterprises wishing to explore the potential of
virtual environments.

However, Prentice added that companies are wary of various complications, such as identity management, and reliability and scalability issues that have plagued public virtual worlds such as Second Life. There is also the risk of brand damage if anything should go awry, as well as the ever-present security issues.

One of the major worries is the risk of security flaws that might expose business-critical information. These are not restricted to virtual worlds, of course, but apply to many other publicly accessible social network sites.

“Having employees access a public service such as Second Life, which is out of their control, is not very attractive to enterprises,” Prentice explained.

Quocirca’s Howarth said that enterprises were also worried about the drain on productivity that might be caused by employees spending too much time at work immersed in these sites.

“There is a range of security issues. For example, users placing too much personal information online that could be compromised, or even giving away corporate information, such as email addresses, or chatting about sensitive corporate issues,” Howarth said.

Corporations allowing employees access to these sites “must educate users and put policies in place as to what constitutes acceptable behaviour, as well as ensuring that those policies are enforced through technology, such as content filtering technologies,”she added.

David Lavenda, vice president of marketing for Web 2.0 security specialist WorkLight, said most enterprises are likely to remain wary of virtual worlds for some time to come.

“I think companies have a problem about adopting things that they don’t necessarily buy or deploy or fully control. It’s a cultural change, and it’s been brought on by things like Google Apps, Salesforce.com and SaaS products,” Lavenda said.

However, Web 2.0 advances have a habit of riding roughshod over such pragmatic concerns about issues such as control. To illustrate this point, Lavenda recalled a recent security forum his firm held in London, where a chief finance officer from a large bank commented, “We don’t allow employees to use Facebook at work, but I don’t want to be the guy holding his finger in the dam, because at some point this is going to overtake us. We have to find a way to allow people to use these tools, because they are going to find a way to use it whether we block it or not.”

One of the more prominent announcements at the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference was the partnership between IBM and Linden Labs, creator of Second Life, who demonstrated how some portions of the virtual environment could be hosted behind a firewall on IBM blade servers. This arrangement has the potential to allay some control and security concerns.

Anyone looking to incorporate virtual world technology into their business strategy should tread cautiously, according to Prentice. “I am firmly of the belief that virtual worlds are a great technology for enterprises, but my attitude is that initially they ought to consider it as an internal tool, before they start worrying about opening it up to the external world,” he said.

As an example, IBM plans to pilot its solution internally, allowing its employees to explore the main Second Life environment and cross the firewall into IBM’s custom-built world without having to log on and off.

An alternative, according to Prentice, is for businesses to create their own small-scale virtual worlds, instead of joining a large-scale public one.

“This could be something like Sun’s Project Wonderland, which is a Java-based set of engines and technology to allow you to build what I would describe as an avatar-enabled collaboration environment,” he said, adding that all firms really needed to get started is a few virtual conference rooms and perhaps a presentation theatre.

Enterprises, however, need to install a system that can be relied on, which IBM could offer. “There’s no doubt that IBM can deliver a stable, 24x7 platform, that is scalable and keeps running ­ that’s their bread and butter,” Prentice said.