Author: Mike Vitale

About Mike: When being interviewed for a job at Lunarpages Web Hosting, Amy asked Mike “What do you want to be when you grow up?” He replied enthusiastically “A rock star” – While chasing this dream, meanwhile he manages the awesome affiliate department at Lunarpages and in his spare time, teaches guitar and plays his sublime music at regular Californian hotspots.

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So, here I am helping my 87 year old grandmother create a profile on MySpace.

I think it is safe to say that when your grandma starts asking for help creating her own MySpace profile, frankly, it’s over. Granted, the days of thinking “MySpace is cool” have already passed; that was here and gone the day mom and dad started logging in religiously about a year ago. Oh well, it was a good run. Much like showing Nana how to program her VCR (we bought her a DVD player for Christmas) or make that technological leap from toaster oven to microwave, she has questions.

- What is MySpace?
- Should I be on MySpace?

As my grandmother stares blankly at the signup page, she explains to me how she heard about it from her friends. She doesn’t understand a thing about it, but wants to make use of it because her friends are. She didn’t hear about MySpace on television. She didn’t hear about it on the radio. MySpace is a cultural phenomenon in the sense that it has spread exclusively by word-of-mouth. Before she even knows what it does she already has the bug. I ask my grandmother, “What’s your email address so I can sign you up?” She replies, “What’s an email address?” I rest my case.

While I visit yahoo.com to sign my grandmother up for an email account, I explain that a few people that I work with have been fired because of MySpace. She is instantly concerned and is obviously second-guessing the necessity to sign up at this point, that is, before I explain that it was because they were using it at work. This, in all honesty, is half of what MySpace is; it’s an obsession. The other half of MySpace is the platform that bridges the gap between those that know how to build a website and host it and those that don’t. MySpace is a website for the newbie and/or clueless i.e. perhaps your non-technical-savvy friends, mother, father, grandfather, and of course, grandmother. More over, MySpace is a place to network and make new friends or a place to find old friends and reconnect; it’s a place to call your own, all without knowing a thing about html code. Now, if we add marketing to this equation, MySpace becomes the next best thing in branded marketing. Where else can you be bombarded with countless ads in the period of one minute aside from television? Personally, I’m partial to the interactive-nose-hair-trimming-game ad that proudly displays on the top fold of my MySpace administration page occasionally after logging in; then again, I’m the same guy that watches infomercials at 4:00 AM, not because I like them, but because they are entrancing at that hour. It’s no wonder that Rupert Murdoch News Corporation purchased MySpace for 580 million USD.

Now, I personally do not have my own MySpace profile. I have a page that I created for my music, which in my opinion serves a different purpose. I show this page to Nana so that she can get an idea of what a MySpace profile looks like. She replies, “Oh, that’s nice honey.” While MySpace has many noticeable shortcomings including its horrid music players, slow page loads, and oversaturated branded marketing, it is certainly the perfect environment for a musician to thrive. From a musician’s stand point, nothing could be better in terms of marketing oneself from the comfort of his/her own home. As an example, how many musicians do you have messaging you and adding you as a friend on a daily basis? If your account is anything like mine, this is often. In fact, you may have found some great new music in this manner alone; then again you may not have as well. For every talented musician you have adding you as a friend for the above stated purpose, there are hundreds of other less-talented that are doing the same thing. Good or bad, musicians have the ability to contact hundreds upon thousands of complete strangers in an effort to get their music heard. If these musicians have a great product, MySpace suddenly becomes one of the best marketing and networking tools for musicians on the internet to date. Where MP3.com opened the door to independent unsigned music being streamed on the internet, MySpace has expanded this territory ten-fold by adding comment, messaging, and blogging capabilities to a musician’s profile. So, if the music is good, the musician has everything he/she needs to create a rabid following of groupies as well as the means to communicate with them effectively and most importantly, provide merchandise including T-Shirts and CD’s to his/her fans.

Most recently, I have experienced the wonders of MySpace as a networking tool. Suddenly, I have people that I haven’t spoken to in years finding my music profile to say hi. MySpace has numerous search functions that assist with locating friends and family; “Ah, how cute is that?” grandma asks. As I innocently visit some of the profiles for said friends and peruse thru their profiles, a random thought occurs to me, isn’t this a bit like stalking? Depending on how much information people choose to divulge, you can learn an awful lot about a person thru their MySpace profile. Just as an example, I was recently at my friends profile which divulged all of the following tidbits of information cloaked within their bio, blogs, as well as conversations held in her comments area: she is desperate for a boyfriend, loves Jeff Buckley, smokes a lot of pot, and she hates her job.

What if one of her superiors from work saw this? What would happen? More importantly, what if someone lascivious used this information in an unpleasant way? I may be wrong, but I think this is what people get addicted to. MySpace is a perfectly legal way to pry into peoples lives without them knowing.

I keep my grandmother’s bio very brief, nothing with too much detail. I show Nana the finished product which she smiles at with deep gratitude before asking, “Who is Tom and why is he my friend?”

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 10:42 am and is filed under Jabber. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed . Comments are currently closed.