MySpace Makes it to Top 10 Internet Sites

prostoalex writes "Nielsen//NetRatings Top 10 is a monthly rating of top 10 Internet destinations. Generally dominated by Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, AOL, eBay and similar major destinations, the list had a newcomer in March of this year. MySpace.com is 10th most visited Web site, losing to #9 Real.com only by 600,000 unique visits per month."

Content Trumps Design

[RunFatBoy.net]

Just goes to show, content and relationships will trump design everytime. MySpace is definite proof.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ [runfatboy.net] -- Exercise for the rest of us.

Real?

[dalutong]

Who goes to real.com?

Publicity

[lecithin]

I hadn't even heard of myspace.com until the stories about rent for sex, police stings that came out over the past several months.

You hear about the bad stuff (and teenage girls) and poof, it gets hits.

Re:real.com WTF?

[Odiumjunkie]

Equally, I'd be prepared to bet that msn.com and aol.com have such high rankings based mostly on their use as the default start page for two popular internet browsers, as opposed to explicit user desire to either surf there or use them as a home page based on anything other than lazyness.

web hits vs. actual web use

[Gothmolly]

So Real's crappy phone-home player may send 100000000 pagehits to their site every month, but (I guess) people actually use MySpace, as retarded as it is. This is a meaningless statistic.

Re:But

[realityfighter]

They were probably collecting data for the companies in the list. Nielsen makes its money selling consumer data, not doing unbiased research.

Re:in other news

[Firehed]

Apparently I've avoided myspace better than you so I never had to put up with it. It's worse than I thought. Hopefully people will realize that static backgrounds are so 1996. Funny how that is... back when I was learning to code html in notepad, my websites looked about the same, but everything was lower resolution and I actually had to do it myself.

They might as well just call it n00bspace.

What really freaks me out is real.com at #9. Who the hell goes to real.com? Surely there isn't that big of a market for doing nothing but downloading the unquestionably worst media player in existance. Unless myspace makes you have realplayer installed to put up with the annoying crap in everyone's pages, so they've got the entire community of 'omg lookit me I've got my own website!!11' noobs worldwide, plus the odd person who actually thinks it's worthwhile.

Maybe I'm just being overly fond of the days when even geeks had dialup and having your own 15mb web presence on Geocities was the cool thing to do (mine's still there!) You'd think that since you can get a domain plus enough hosting to do a mypsace page without the noob for about $30 a year, people might go for that option. Honestly, is myspace.com/noob any more attractive of a site address than geocities.com/noob? Why be a crappy wannabe when you can have noob.com and use your host's page builder app and do wannabe right?

Re:Sorry...

[Vorondil28]

but MySpace behaves as though it were coded by fucking retarded monkeys.

Flamebait? Yes. True? Most definitely.

Re:Content Trumps Design

[moosesocks]

Not always. flickr is a good example

there were dozens of other mildly successful photography communities before flickr came along, many of which covered the social networking aspect of flickr much better.

flickr simply has the best mix of community and design out there, hence its success among pro photographers and occasional shutterbugs alike.

facebook is another example. It's basically a well-designed myspace for college kids with proper privacy features. It took hold in a market where dozens of other sites had failed miserably. The design's clean, the site's never been slow to memory (despite exponential growth). Because of this, it is far more prevalent than Myspace among college kids. At my medium-sized state school, I'd estimate that about 90%+ of the student body uses facebook regularly. It's that popular. It's preferred over myspace because it's fast, usable, and not creepy.

Re:Sorry...

[libra-dragon]

So true, but that's not their main problem. It appears to me that they change their code constantly thoughout the day. So, it's not so much the retarded monkeys' coding so much as their ability to keep their shitty code out of production. They must do their development on their production servers, because there's always something in the middle of the day that just broke and they're working on a fix. That's not how a top 10 site should operate. They need to get some change control in place --perhaps QA/QC as well.

According to Alexa..

[Sir Pallas]

MySpace has been in the top ten since January.

Re:But

[Ethan Allison]

The general public doesn't care about good code

But they care (too much, perhaps) when a site, especially one they like (too much, perhaps) becomes unreliable and slow. Many people seem to actually need to go to Myspace constantly - within 30 minutes of people realizing my school district blocked Myspace, they came running to me asking me to get it to work again.

Re:Content Trumps Design

[Dis*abstraction]

When I was in college, several years ago, there were thefacebook, MySpace, and Friendster. Here's how it broke down:

1. Friendster was old-school, lovable, slow. Wrinkled. Crammed with ads. The album of photos you burned the summer before school.

2. thefacebook: Fratboys, sorority girls, other assorted meatheads. Oh, it had its day, all right, which lasted about a week.

3. MySpace, the site for "the rest of us." Music and art.

4. Evites are king, now and always.

I hope you found this as enlightening as I found it surprisingly boring to write.

Re:not your space

[Anonymous Coward]

You're still in the honeymoon phase and honestly, if those past friends actually meant something to you, you would have found them someway. The internet makes sincerity seem easy.

Contrarian Opinion : Myspace rocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think everybody here on Slashdot that slams Myspace is full of shit. First of all, Myspace is awesome for amateur musicians, who for the most part dominate Myspace. Contrary to the popular Slashdot stereotype of Myspacers, a typical Myspace user is not some teenie bopper teenage girl playing bait the pedophile (a popular sport for sure, and yes there are those, but its just a stereotype, and these are not in the majority by any shot).

Bands dominate myspace. Bands networking with other bands and with people who want to listen to new fresh music. For the most part there are thousands and thousands and thousands of homebrew bands who would never get any kind of exposure at all now able to easily get their music out to the masses so they can listen to something other than censored formulated dribble on the radio.

Myspace is the biggest free for all music extravaganza there ever was, and its a hotbed of creativity... not only music, but graphics, and yes bizarre weird profiles. Myspace makes something like Itunes look like total crap, it even blows past the P2P networks (Limewire, etc) for distributing music around the globe. People don't want to download music, they want to stream it, and move on.

I never made music before in my life, but one day I tried it. And bam, what I did, surprised me. Where did that come from? So I made a little more. Next thing I know, two hundred people every day listen to my music around the globe. They do it for free, and I distribute it for free. Two hundred people a day listening to something you made... just rocks. And I'm just a small fish in a big, big pond.

I'll tell you what is bullshit. The slashdot formula. Its so obvious after a while its a joke. Post topics on the main page that are blatantly wrong and inflamatory, simply to have many people sweep down on it and argue this and that and the other like a bunch of female cackling hens. Its not productive, its not interesting, its rather dumb. Its based on nothing more than chosing articles to post that get peoples gander up to attract more page views and more arguing back and forth and as so many people have stated before, the information is always stupid or wrong or not even interesting from a geek standpoint.

If you want to break the RIAA's back, support Myspace. Or shut up and add music and video uploads to Slashdot. How long has it been since the slashcode has had any major, major features from a user standpoint implmented? Slashdot to me looks like the same Slashdot from 5 years ago...

And on the internet, you stand still, and your traffic dies...

You wouldn't be screaming to high heaven at Myspace if they weren't running circles around you and burning you to dust. Real winners don't whine. They see what's going on on the battlefield, and they respond appropriatly with a counter action. Whining is a sign of envy and a display of ones own inability to adapt and keep pace.

Einstein
50 caliber Fist FK
http://rootpassword.com/ [rootpassword.com]

chinese websites?

[t35t0r]

What about the statistics from chinese websites? That "top 10" list hasn't a clue.

Re:in other news

[Eneff]

I, like you, missed the entire point of myspace for a few months.

I still don't like it, but I understand it now. It's much like hanging out in a trendy nightclub. At home, I can make the drinks better, I have better taste in decor (what, dragons on the walls isn't better?), and I have full control of my castle.

But the nightclub is where all the people are!

It's a way to connect with all of your friends, with a common identification system. Yes, it's ugly as fuck, but that's not the point.

Re:in other news

[nmb3000]

Ugh, no thanks. That place is the most awful cespool on the Internet.

No joke.

I'm not sure what's worse, that MySpace made it to the top 10 or that Real's website was in the top 10.

Either way society is/was/will be doomed.
 

Re:Contrarian Opinion : Myspace rocks!

[headbulb]

Are you seriously that dilustional?

You Say that mostly bands use myspace. Yes some do But not all nor is it most the profiles. Most profiles are of teens or people who can't seem to spell the simple word "you". Yes it's simple three letters.

I know you're flamebait, But I am responding to you anyways. For some reason a moderator mod you up.

mp3.com before they got bought out was ten times better then myspace would ever be for bands.

Then you go on to say that slashdots users are jealous of myspace users. You do know that the reason people come to slashdot isn't so much for the articles as it is for the article sized comments. A community of Intellectuals that is grouped around technology. Myspace is a pop culture group.
The arguing on /. is for refining a persons ideas. Without the opposition you'd never find holes in your idea's.

What use would adding video uploads to slashdot be? The video craze is a fad right now. (when I say fad I mean in it's current form) Sites such as youtube are working off of VC. Hence they arn't profitable. It just means some guys where able to convince some other people to give them money to setup a site, I can't see their site making money to pay the bills in the long run unless they change their bussiness plan. I could see them trying a sell this bussiness to someone else type of thing. They do have one thing that has value, a community. Which is why fox corp bought myspace. It's their demographic, a not very inteligent one. (Almost free research.)

Break the RIAA's back? What? Myspace isn't that strong when it comes to music. Most the bands on myspace are local bands trying to expand, they don't because they don't have a large appeal. (aka they suck!!!) People don't like to admit it but the riaa has some good bands along with the bad.

I know I probably made mistakes, but whatever I don't care.

One last thing. If you don't like slashdot so much. Just leave.

Re:Contrarian Opinion : Myspace rocks!

[mlylecarlin]

"Bands dominate myspace."

Bands dominate YOUR myspace. Log out and try visiting as an anonymous user. From there it's pretty obvious: idiots dominate myspace.

slashdot elitism

[Anonymous Coward]

There seems to be a prevailing view on /. that anything catering to and/or enjoyed by the public masses must be crap. Google seems to be the exception here since it carefully maintains its geek persona. While myspace does have its share of over-sexed, over-htmled crap, it has also provided brand new avenues for advertisers, marketers and, perhaps most importantly, independent bands. It's also quite handy for staying in touch with people you'd otherwise never be able to talk to.

For the most part, I don't find the bantering on /. to be that much more mature than what goes on at myspace... slashdotters just seem to take themselves more seriously. At the end of the day, myspace is about having fun. Perhaps the reason slashdotters don't use myspace and are coming down so hard on it is their lack of entertaining stories/pictures/life to share with the world...

Re:in other news

[Max Threshold]

Even LiveJournal does a better job of all that than myspace.

Actually

[Lawrence Dudley]

Actually, Myspace is a great place to meet people I haven't seen in ages. Those of us with more friends than their PC will use myspace. And no, my page is not 9000px wide, and yes, I did code the css myself. Not everyone on myspace is a noob, but a lot of people on /. are ignorant!

Re:in other news

[4D6963]

It's much like hanging out in a trendy nightclub

Exactly, the site is kind of fucked up, it makes Firefox crash every ten profiles I visit, but damn, what better spot than that is there to make yourself a better substitute of a social life?

Everybody's there! from your favorite singer to your classmates to the Playboy model/pornstar you jacked off to last night!

Re:Real?

[DavidLeblond]

Wait... who uses RealPlayer??

Re:in other news

[Transmogrify_UK]

but I think that anyone publishing content should have an understanding of the medium on which it's being published. I don't mean doing a view source and rendering the page in your head, but people not familiar with <br> really shouln't be putting stuff online and thinking highly of themselves, as the myspacers tend to.

I'm glad you're not the man at the top who decides what goes on the internet or otherwise. Because the internet would absolutely suck.

That is absolutely the best thing about the internet, whether you know about or have any kind of understanding of the medium or not, for free ANYONE can make their voice heard. Whether it's heard by one or a million people, you're still able to say your piece, whatever it might be.

Yes, there are some horrific sites out there that are completely standards incompliant, that are garish, that cause your browser to crash, that takes an hour to load and has horrific Celine Dion music in the background, but does it REALLY matter?

Myspace falls into the above category.. it's not a "homepage builder", it's a community site. It's for people who have no interest in what a <br> tag is but still lets them communicate and let their voice be heard.

So you don't like it, ignore it. It's doing no harm.