Stealing mySpace by Julia Angwinn is an interesting look behind the scenes at the history of MySpace. While Facebook gets all the media attention MySpace is still by far the second largest social networking site in the world. The book looks at the astounding rise of MySpace, which went from a Friendster competitor designed to save a flagging department at eUniverse, an Internet company best known for hawking dubious diet pills and downloadable cursors packaged with spy ware, to being sold for close to one billion dollars to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
What I found most interesting is when Julia talks about why MySpace was built the way it was. The option to customize pages, for example, was an early design flaw that the team only held off on fixing once they saw how popular it was and how MySpace took best ideas from around the Web, encouraging pinup stars such as Tila Tequila to make their home on its pages and giving everyone freedom to experiment with online identities–including using somebody else’s identity.
There is one paragraph in the book that really caught my attention. Angwinn quotes an essay written by Danah Boyd (http://www.danah.org/) who described the class difference between MySpace and Facebook as follows:
The Goody Two-shoes, jocks, athletes and other “good” kinds are now going to Facebook. these kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and gong to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward tot he prom and live in a world dictated by after-school activities.
MySpace is still home to Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts”, “Alternative kids’, “art fags”, punks, emos, Goths gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who don;t pay into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after school. Teens who really are into music or in a band are also on MySpace, MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.
I found this paragraph so interesting. Is one of the reasons why MSM (main stream media) gives Facebook (and Twitter) so much publicity because reporters view Facebook users as people with goals and viewpoints similar to their own?
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Nice review and thoughts. You’ve pushed me over the edge – I’ll have to read the book. Thanks for your thoughts.
Interesting article. I would definitely read the book. Someone said – Myspace is more casual/trendy and geared towards teens, whereas facebook is for matured audience. I find it true to a large extend as it applied very much to my network of my people.
But I think Myspace realized that allowing users to create their own web pages which very often are bizarre, extremely difficult to read and extremely heavy because of graphics and video contents has its toll.
Very interesting… and I never knew why MS took the proverbial backseat…. guess I am too old! FB and Twitter are so prominent due to their ease of use and their viral marketing. For me, MS didn’t have the pull simply due to the highly customized space. Very difficult to find people, groups etc. FB is much more user friendly and far less time consuming!
I did a review of Stealing MySpace a few weeks back, I have to say it’s not a page-turner until about half-way though when Rupert Murdoch shows up, but it’s also interesting in that the technology isn’t the story – though in the case of MySpace, it seems like the technology was always secondary.
Julia Angwin, Wall Street Journalist and author of the popular book and 1st tell all book “Stealing Myspace” with CEO of Blogtalkradio Alan Levy today at 3 pm est.
http://budurl.com/StealingMyspace come listen and interact with her via chat or call in.