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kottke.org posts about Myspace

Traditional media’s adoption of social media

Think about the following platforms and when the first traditional media activity/participation occurred in that platform’s history: Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Chatroulette. It was a shorter and shorter period for each platform.*

Let’s call this the adoption half-life. It’s a bastardization of Moore’s Law, but the level of adoption required for a social platform to be covered as The Next Big Thing in social platforms will continue to decrease until NBT status is bestowed upon a platform used only by those in the media.

I’d been writing a post about this that wasn’t coming out the way I wanted, so I shelved it until I saw The Onion’s take on last fall’s New York Times’ take on Foursquare. Then I decided to jam 2 posts together.

The Onion sums this all up way more succinctly:

Aging, scared newspapermen throw themselves at the latest mobile technology trend in a humiliatingly futile attempt to remain relevant.

For his part, Foursquare founder, Dennis Crowley, had this to say:

Um, The Onion poking fun of @foursquare (and me). This is the greatest moment of my entire life.

*If someone has a LexisNexis account and can find the first mention of these platforms, I’d be grateful, but since this is the internet, I don’t need sources, mirite?


Stanley Kubrick on MySpace

Stanley Kubrick’s MySpace page is actually pretty interesting. Lots of photos of the man and his films.


Every gay in America (okay, in coastal

Every gay in America (okay, in coastal America) is flapping his hands today over the New! Magnetic Fields! Album! that is apparently out tomorrow; Pitchfork gave it an 8.0 today. According to my gays, it is streaming on the MySpace. I hope the Magnetic Fields MySpace is not taunting teenagers to death though.


MySpace Press Conference On ‘Internet Safety’ Today

MySpace is having “a press conference to make a major announcement in regards to Internet safety” today at the Sheraton in New York at 11 a.m. EST, according to their press office. (If you want to listen in, citizen journalist, you can dial it up and listen in at 800-895-0231 or 785-424-1054, with conference ID: ABCDE.) Quite possibly related: Today, the New Yorker takes on the so-called “MySpace Suicide Hoax,” in which 13-year-old Megan Meier hanged herself after being taunted by neighbors posing on MySpace as a teen boy. In the neighborhood drama that ensued, an innocent foosball table was also destroyed.


Congrats to the Vimeo team on the

Congrats to the Vimeo team on the launch of the latest version of the site. Here’s the announcement post. The login/signup page is awesome. I also like how Vimeo has found room in the crowded video-on-the-web field, even though YouTube dominates the space. Vimeo is to YouTube as Facebook is to MySpace…not in terms of closed versus open (you do know that Facebook is AOL 2.0, right?) but in terms of being a bit more well thought out and not as, well, ugly (and not just in the aesthetic sense).


John McCain is using Mike Davidson’s MySpace

John McCain is using Mike Davidson’s MySpace template (without attribution) and pulling some images directly from Davidson’s server, which is a big no-no in webmaster land. So Davidson modified one of his images displaying on McCain’s MySpace page to say that he’d reversed his position on gay marriage, especially “marriage between passionate females”.


Finally, a book unafraid to speak the

Finally, a book unafraid to speak the truth: MySpace for Dummies. I keed, I keed.


Even though the most popular password on

Even though the most popular password on MySpace is “password1” (the 5th most popular password is “blink182”), most users’ passwords are pretty good…and better than corporate employees’ passwords.


Hollywood studios are increasingly not showing their

Hollywood studios are increasingly not showing their movies to critics before the official release. “The media world is changing, and the people they want to reach are the kids who are looking at MySpace.com and exchanging instant messages about pictures aimed at them. Conventional critics don’t matter.”


A fan site on MySpace for the

A fan site on MySpace for the hot UK band Arctic Monkeys reportedly sold for $2000+, although it’s unclear (because they took the auction page down) if eBay allowed the transaction to go through. Mena, how much for Ready Steadman Go?


Table of the odds of dying from

Table of the odds of dying from various injuries. Looking at statistics like these, I’m always amazed at how worried people are about things that don’t often result in death (fireworks, sharks) and how relatively dangerous automobiles are (see, for example, this list of people on MySpace who have died…many of the deaths on the first two pages involve cars).