Friendspammed

After a year of dormancy during which "Tom" has been my only friend on my MySpace page (set up to check out the service), I added a link to Octavianworld.  Stunned by its genius, three of the 163 million reported MySpace members sent me friend requests in the last two days. 

One was from "Gracie", a "23-year-old male" living in "Louisiana" (no photo), whose main reason in wanting to befriend me appears to have been to sell me an iPhone. Yesterday Kaylee, a "25-year-old" male from "NEOLA, Iowa" (no photo) thoughtfully reached out with the same offer. Very interesting to see that through "Kaylee", I could also meet guys like "Pete", "AJ", and "EX", among less mentionable aliases, all apparently kind enough to accept Kaylee's invitation.  Today, "Bridget"  reached out.  I clicked on her name and was informed by the next page that I needed to install MS Viewer so I could see the adult content she apparently was offering as a token of her friendship. 

Flattered of course, but I passed.  With projections that by the end of this year 90% of email will be spam (http://www.crn.com/security/197008347), this makes me wonder how many MySpace users  are "Gracies", "Kaylees", and "Bridgets".   A " social friendspam filter" for MySpace would make lots of sense for its users, maybe something on the lines of Cloudmark (http://cloudmark.com ), which I've used successfully.  But since it might call into question the user and traffic numbers that attract advertisers there, I'm sure we'll see that Real Soon Now.  Meanwhile, I'm maxing out privacy settings in my profile to help keep further friendspam at bay. 

For a long time I didn't think much of this service, and this experience reinforced that.  It just seemed like a warmed-over GeoCities to me (though I suppose it's worth remembering that Yahoo! paid nearly $4 billion for GeoCities in 1999).  But, the $25 million per month (and growing) Fox claims to be making from it continues to prove me wrong (http://mashable.com/2007/02/09/myspace-makes-25-million-a-month-in-ads/), so naturally I'm thinking hard about what I'm missing.  (BTW, I wonder how much of the $25 million represents amortization of the $900-million-over-five-years deal with Google?  Mathematically of course the answer is $15 million on a straight-line basis, anyone know different?). 

Perhaps one reason for MySpace's success has been that it brought hyper-linking to the masses, in the form of the "friend request".  However, while simplicity of use is surely a big factor, a more interesting question would be how much of MySpace's users and traffic happen in the context of its groups.  "Affinity" is a big stimulant for interaction online.   Affinity in this context means to me the idea that people are more likely to contribute and consume in bounded groups of folks they know, or almost know, or with whom there's at least some highly significant shared interest.  Sometimes, as in the case of Philip Greenspun's http://photo.net, the strength of the seed content and the nature of the interest and associated interactions (photographers learning from photographers) can be strong enough to overcome natural suspicions. But in most cases it doesn't work that way.

I believe that one reason Facebook was able to flourish so quickly, despite following MySpace, was because it seems to understand this better --  Facebook started out based on private groups  based on a pre-defined (school-based) affinity.  By contrast, groups seem to have appeared later on MySpace as a bolt-on.   And they still don't seem to be implemented properly, that is,  private by default. 

For example, I thought about joining my high school's group site on MySpace.  I decided not to join when I found that its members and contents could be viewed by a non-member.  Yet over 100 fellow alums have, and haven't been shy about posting pictures of their little kids either.   The cynical view of course would be to assume that Fox set the defaults to "public" to maximize traffic, and by giving group administrators the option to "privatize" it absolves itself of responsibility for unintended consequences. 

Setting aside any normative judgments, from a purely managerial perspective I think this ultimately is corrosive for the service, and I would do it differently.  MySpace's continued success suggests I may have some old-guy biases I need to get past.  Maybe that's why I'm still friendless, except for Tom,  and he doesn't really count -- though I appreciate the gesture.