Personal ‘networking’
The ‘social networking’ aspect of MySpace is too broad and non-specific. Clicking through on a band name in a profile to find thousands of other users into the same music is ridiculous, and the purpose-built ‘seach’ function is equally broad. Searching by name, school or affiliation is non-specific and leads to way too many search results. It’s not difficult to build a compound search function, and I can’t believe there isn’t a better way to find people in an environment dubbed ‘social networking’. At least then a band and location could be joined to find people in a specific location into similar music, and then the ‘networking’ would actually have a purpose.
It’s more like social ‘stumbling’ rather than ‘networking’. Most people find ‘friends’ (read: ‘randoms’) by stumbling from profile to profile, browsing picture galleries and prying into other people’s lives. If they like the look of someone’s profile they then spam them with comments or friend requests. It’s like a 24/7 pick-up joint with no cover charge. Online dating sites must be getting nervous. It also reminds of the ‘Customers who bought this product also bought’ feature of Amazon and the ‘neighbours’ concept of last.fm as far as music and tv shows in profiles are concerned.
For average users who don’t want to customise layouts and who are happy to put up with a poor UI, clumsy usability and slow servers I guess MySpace is perfect for meeting new friends. For power users it’s incredibly frustrating. There are so many areas that could be improved. Customising the style of a profile is done by dumping HTML into fields intended for profile text, because there has been no provision made for CSS or custom HTML as part of the UI design.
Using MySpace for Business
Due to the lack of targetted searches MySpace adds little value for businesses looking to monetise online relationships. It all comes back to the MySpace stumble mentioned above. If the owner of a snowboarding store is looking to ‘network’ using MySpace, new ‘friends’ will find the owner via searching for snowboarding. They’ll be looking for people with similar interests, not for a snowboarding store to purchase from. There are no potential customers searching for goods to purchase like the typical google traffic caught by blogs with strong SEO.
With tagging, SEO, targetted content and huge potential monetisation available from blogs, I don’t know why businesses would want to venture into MySpace in search of potential customers. The MySpace market is saturated with bands seeking stardom, boys seeking girls and girls seeking boys. It’s not a place for consumers looking to make informed purchases or seek professional services. That’s what google is for, so potential stumbling time is far better spent on developing blogs and true online relationships. The key concept is in the slogan; ‘A place for friends’. MySpace is not a place for business. If you really must try, throw a link into your personal profile and see what happens.
An exception applies to guerrilla marketing. The plans for the revamped Flock community section involve banners and buttons for MySpace available for fans to download. This is a great idea – the Flock fans amongst the 70 million strong MySpace community can continue to stumble around, bump into each other and inadvertantly spread the word about Flock, while the Flock team doesn’t have to waste time with the clumsy UI and can concentrate on developing the world’s best browser… great thinking Will.
Time for an upgrade
MySpace = instant messaging online + profile. It’s very simple. Why not make the messages more conversational? The best email clients and webmail solutions have embraced conversation threads and I don’t know why MySpace doesn’t follow this trend. Grouping related messages would make conversations much easier to follow. Even better would be RSS feeds for each profile so users could subscribe to new messages. I’m surprised this isn’t a feature – users receive emails when a message is added to their own profile, but there’s no way to monitor any other profile for new messages. I guess it’s due to ad revenue from page views, but RSS would significantly improve the usability. While we’re talking about syndication, MySpace blogs are indexed by Technorati and should probably start following some blog trends. At the very least MySpace blogs should have RSS feeds too.
Is simple better, and will MySpace last?
Is MySpace so successful because it’s so clumsy and clunky that people trust it? Just like craigslist, if social networking tools aren’t too flashy do consumers trust them more? Maybe. Perhaps the beauty of MySpace is the simplicity, because it certainly isn’t the UI… and I’m thinking MySpace might only be a fad. It’s got a massive customer base but without some innovation MySpace may be surpassed by the competition.
Update: Tweaking the UI
Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine, has posted an awesome how-to called ‘Hacking a More Tasteful MySpace‘. He’s done an outstanding job detailing how you can tweak and customise your page, which came about because Mike was initially frustrated with his generic, poorly styled profile when he signed up. Check out the results of the hack on Mike’s MySpace profile.
Update: Some background on the article
Several days before this article was written, Tim Jackson made an awesome comment when discussing the merits of MySpace for business;
Blogs are scary enough for a lot of folks, but MySpace is kind of like standing naked in front of a Super Bowl crowd.
He’s wrapped it up beautifully. What do you think?
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