MySpace #1 US Destination Last Week

An anonymous reader writes "Hitwise is reporting that MySpace has reached the top, surpassing Yahoo! Mail as the most visited site on the internet for US users. Seeing a 4300% increase in visits in just two short years, this internet sensation has come quite a long ways. From the article: 'To put MySpace's growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com represented 1.9% of all Internet visits. With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits.'"

What can we learn from this?

[ThePineTree.net]

How can we learn from this to make our sites better. Can we translate this type of activity to the 30+ crowd instead of just the teens?

counting hits?

[NynexNinja]

How do you obtain their numbers? Are they using DNS? Are they putting sniffers on all the core routers? Is this even possible to any degree of accuracy? It seems this junk science is probably about as reliable as Neilsen ratings...

Find this hard to believe.

[extra the woos]

I find this difficult to believe. I would think that google would have more visits than myspace, for sure.

understanding myspace

[argoff]

Myspace is driven and pushed by "old media", not "new media". It is old media's way of saying, well if people must bypass our traditional control over information and content for the internet - let's try to make it our internet and not someone elses. For example, their obsession with "child predators" as of late probably has little to do with protecting children and everything to do with making sure that their system is fenced off from "that big nasty mean world out there". No, not the nasty world of child abusers, but the nasty world that breaks their distribution monopoly on information, news, and content.

They are the "bread and circuses" of the information age. Feed em crap, keep em happy, and most of all keep their eyes and ears distracted from political and financial issues of the real world. Like them or hate them, you gotta admit theyre doing a hell of a job at pushing the hype. IMHO, it is truely amazing.

Observation on Microsoft re: MySpace

[afabbro]

I find this interesting in a Microsoft context. Microsoft has consistently tried to gather a bigger share of the Internet pie and consistently failed. First, MSN never got near AOL back in the walled garden days. Then MSN never got near Yahoo in the directory wars. Or near any of the major search engines, much less Google. MSN Home or Communities or whatever never got any kind of traction when blogging sprung to life.

And now, a startup is the #1 site (or even if you question the numbers, pretty obviously in the top five) and there is nothing Microsoft has to show.

Sure, you can say Microsoft makes its money in other places, they're an OS/app company, etc. but they sure spend a lot of money on MSN, trying to get more Internet eyeballs. To me, an outside observer, it just seems that they are eternally reactionary and a couple years behind, despite having practically unlimited resources. What an indictment.

And what percentage of the traffic is bots?

[micheas]

I received 55 friend requests today none of them from real people. (Well I haven't looked at all of them, but the few I clicked on were from profiles that identified them selves as 18-22 single female, and all had lots of male "friends" they all more or less looked like ads for dating services, promos for bands, etc.)

It is kind of interesting that myspace seems to hold up under all the spam, even though they don't seem to do much about it (or are at least losing the war badly)

Hmm, time to go check out freshmeat for a myspace invite script.

Re:What can we learn from this?

[cgenman]

I wanted to write a humorous response, but the answer is simply: yes.

Basically, My Space does all of those sappy things that the internet was supposed to do years ago. The content is all by users. It's all about helping people network with eachother. It appeals to people's vanity as well as their curiosity. It happens to have a great underserved niche (indie bands) that tent pegs it even if they aren't the primary users. It's naughty. It's viral.

Basically, put control in the hands of your users, and let them work for the communal site. Find some underserved niche and add features to support their usage habits. Make sure everyone joins. Don't censor interesting stuff. Be a community builder rather than a content provider.

Let them build it, and they will come.

Re:blwh

[Joe U]

Sorry, I'm going to have to flame you.

I program in CF, sometimes it just drives me NUTS! Its the tons of little problems that Adobe/Macromedia/Allaire won't fix.

Honestly, CF is on a slow decline. It had potential, but they were more interested in making a quick buck. (No service packs for CF5 is criminal)

And NewAtlanta is not much better. Could have come out with a $300 CF server, flooded the market and charged extra for support. But no, instead you get a free license that basically says you can't run hello world without asking permission and commercial one is $900. Why would I spend $900 for a CF clone? The original doesn't cost much more.

I've got the same feeling

[msloan]

I kind of wish the internet was still limited to the nerds in some way - not that it's less free for everyone to use - it's just that if you want to put something on the internet you would have to seek out a nerd facilitator... Anyway, yes, most of the internet is now rubbish. Thankfully search engines do a decent job of sorting through this rubbish, but as the rubbish becomes more important than real information that might change. That is, a retarded blog page linked to from tons of spots might rise to the top of a google search, as oppoed to a reasonable, informative resource. I suppose it might be possible to start again - offer something like the internet yet make it better. I've always wanted a better markup language than html. Screw xml in general - create a new semantic markup language and presentation system. I know that this doesn't actually have much to do with a new internet, however if you're going to have a new network, might as well use a new format as the standard. If people have access to this new network, the browsers will be provided as well. The network could be cobbled together through wireless repeaters, at first a neighborhood of access, eventually a city, etc. Wires between wireless bits could provide fast interconnect between locations. Routing around would likely require complex pathfinding, but after a path is visited it could be optimized. Repeaters could learn where to send packets for fastest delivery. Bridges between the new and the old would also need to be constructed, yet metadata, tagging, commenting, rating, moderating could all be built in. Most of all with this system is that you wouldn't need fancy dancy servers to produce popular content. The repeaters would have hefty hard drives and work somewhat like bittorrent, extept that everyone actually seeds. All the kludges of the current internet could be alleviated. Maybe its a crackpot idea, I haven't thought it out throughly. Mod parent up!

Re:What can we learn from this?

[mahulth]

Disclaimer: this isn't meant to argue against your question, just that you happened to mention how this can apply to the 30+ crowd and I figured I'd say how it already has. Social communities in the professional crowd thus far are awkward at best, usually because professionals simply don't want to waste their time on a networking tool based off of a teen socializing model.

You'd be amazed how many 30+ users are on myspace. Just cause you're 30, doesn't mean you can't be involved in the service industry, the music industry, maybe joined a rollerderby league, or simply enjoy shooting the shit with old friends. Not everyone whose 30 is married with kids in the 'burbs. From friends who are posting some smack after finishing bar shifts to bands who wanna let the ol' timers in town know they're playing a gig to keeping in touch with friends who moved away, it's an extremely useful - and oftentimes hilarious - way to connect with one another.

I myself am 30, a computer scientist and single living in the city. I used to do punk shows and run a distro in college. So I mainly use it for keeping in touch with old bands I used to work with coming through and, of course, giving my friends a hard time every once in a while. It certainly doesn't suck up my time, and usually have quite a bit of fun with it.

And certainly what no one I know who's 30+ has used it for is trying to find a date. I know they're out there, but they're hardly the ones who are establishing the "community". And yes, thus far using myspace may be more of a "city thing", but it works, it's fun, and it's incredibly useful - for all kinds of things (especially for finding new bands (but that's a whole other basis for argument)).

Reason for popularity

[ashman512]

I think one of the reasons that Myspace is so popular is that it allows the people who use it to be able to rank their popularity using the comments and friends list, and then compare it to their friends in real life. The more friends and comments they have, the more popular(or at least to them) they will be in the real world. They don't consider the quality of what they have on their pages to be as important as how much they have. Instead of keeping there people on there friends list that are actually their friends, they add people that they may barely know, or not know at all. They usually also try and usually make there pages as big and flashy as possible, and fill it with lots of random things to try and make it look more important and meaningful. When a person posts a comment on another persons page, they usually expect that that person will post one on there page(and they usually do), which is what I think is the cause of the lack of comments that seem to be repetitive and contentless.

Oh great, more bandwidth wastage

[Gord]

Myspace users accounted for nearly 10% (2gb) of my bandwidth usage last month from my general webserving box. Mostly by people using a direct link to a 4Meg image for their background image. Fortunatly this has been largely mitigated with an apache rewrite redirecting myspace users to a polite message asking them to stop.

However this leads me to wonder how much bandwidth myspace is sucking from non-myspace servers just so users can have pretty background pages and other assorted images. Helping support Rupert Murdoch isn't something I'm happy to waste bandwidth on.

heh

[playingwithknives]

Im 34, my beautiful, wonderful, amazing girlfriend I met through myspace is 33, my myspace friends are all mid 20s to low 40s. Ive met and socialised with some, and romanced a few too and its all been pretty damn cool so far. Its been good for finding a partner, finding friends, and finding fuckbuddies and those ive met have interests similar to mine. Seeing all the myspace hate in this thread, perhaps having a pc/mac/net enthusiast, video game playing, star trek watching, sci fi & fantasy fan female friend/or more isn't the type of thing slashdot readers are looking for? I just avoided the kiddies/teens/emo's with a simple age filter on searches and it actually turned out to be one of the better websites about for meeting new people.

Re:Worthless.

[IamTheRealMike]

It doesn't seem to make any difference. We care, because we're really great at this stuff, but marketing trumps usability every time.

MySpace is well designed, you just can't see the forest for the trees.

Firstly, go read this article [joelonsoftware.com] which talks about what geeks call "marketing", which is often used as a throwaway term for all the parts of running a software business that the programmers don't really understand or care about. MySpace has not done any serious marketing. It grew entirely through word of mouth.

Next, go actually look at MySpace, and do it through the eyes of a non-technical young person. I don't mean a 16 year old, though I'm sure there are lots there, I mean anybody under 35. MySpace offers the following things:

• It's distracting and fun. It has lots of features that let people spend their time just faffing around - redesigning their profile yet again, finding cool bands, seeing who their friends friends are, writing on peoples walls etc. If there's nothing good on TV and they don't have much energy it's an easy way to be entertained.

• It lets people express themselves. Ever wondered why almost every MySpace profile page is customised? Well, people just love to express themselves. How many people live in a room with no ornaments or posters or personal artifacts? Hardly anybody right? Why do people blow 8mb of memory on a wallpaper that will sit under their copy of Word for 90% of the day? Why do people use annoying custom ringtones that they change every few weeks? People like to customise their personal space, it's just a part of who we are, and MySpace allows you to do that.

• It's a quick and easy way for musicians to get their music out to the masses. See the example of Lily Allen in the UK for somebody who made it big via MySpace. Ditto for I think the Arctic Monkeys.

• It can be used as a dating site even though it's not marketed that way.

  It used to be that people met through local institutions ... if you go back and ask your grandmother how she met your grandfather I wouldn't be surprised to hear an answer like "we went to the same church" or "he worked in a local shop and I saw him every day when buying groceries". This sort of thing is now very uncommon. People live more isolated lives, and it's often hard to date people you meet through work due to workplace politics - this is especially true of slightly older types who are in management.

  So it's not surprising that surveys and studies everywhere show that use of internet dating is way, way up and growing all the time. But it still has some social stigma attached to it. MySpace lets you search peoples profiles by region and easily contact them, which is all you really need to have a "dating site", except anybody who is on there can simply say they are there because their friends are there, because they like the bands etc. And for people looking it's better too, as people tend to post (mostly) real photos and don't just make stuff up, because they know their friends might see it.

• It has lots and lots and lots of people

Some things MySpace doesn't have: technical sophistication, robustness, speed - all the things geeks value. These things do matter, look at how totally Facebook has crushed MySpace amongst those who have access to it. But never discount the value of a good social design, because these sites aren't tech demos, they are social networking sites.

Re:I just realized...

[Yusaku Godai]

This is perhaps the most profound comment on this entire thread.
I can't agree more.

Re:Narcissism

[Anonymous Coward]

> In many ways, the whole blog concept has perhaps lowered the barrier to entry for on-line publishing a little *too* far.

Perhaps, but I don't really think so.

I suspect that the true heart of your objection is purely a lexical issue: that the word "blog" has too broad of a meaning.

It's a damn shame when an outstanding journal like Pamela Jones's is placed in the same category as some 15-year-old's semi-coherent ramblings on MySpace -- and that's what happens when we use the word "blog" to describe both.

We just need time to develop a richer vocabulary.

For example, the word "food" describes anything we put in our mouth; but, over time, we have supplemented it with other words such as "cuisine" and "snack" to help us make important distinctions about quality and quantity.

Likewise, we will start enhancing the word "blog" some day, and for the same reasons.

Re:heh

[freeweed]

I have a small bit of hate reserved for MySpace because everything there seems to be written like your post. Stream-of-consciousness ranting with no thought towards presentation.

In short, like instant messaging before it, it's destroying literacy. Capitalization. Punctuation. Proper pluralization. Most importantly, sentence structure and paragraphs. All seem to be missing from 99% of MySpace pages.

It took me a few minutes to decipher just what it was you were trying to say with "perhaps having a pc/mac/net enthusiast, video game playing, star trek watching, sci fi & fantasy fan female friend/or more isn't the type of thing slashdot readers are looking for?", and that would count as one of the more coherent sentences on MySpace.

However, you do raise an interesting point: You'd think a bunch of self-declared introverts/social outsiders would LOVE an online site for "hooking up". Personally, I avoid social networking online in any form precisely *because* I don't want to spend my offline hours hanging with fellow Slashdotters :)