MySpace: Most Popular Internet Site
According to Hitwise, a “leader in online competitive intelligence” (they measure internet traffic), MySpace.com has passed Yahoo! Mail as the most popular internet destination.
Today Hitwise issued a press release reporting that for the first time, www.myspace.com has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users.
Ok. Make that for “US Internet users.” Still, pretty impressive.
Over at Slashdot there were a couple good comments on MySpace.
IamTheRealMike explains why MySpace is so stinking popular:
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:
And foreverdisillusioned lamented the eternal presence of comments made online:
When I first started messing around on the internet 10+ years ago, I used my first name for a couple things. Very quickly I caught on that this wasn’t such a great idea, but what I didn’t count on is lifelong archival and the rising power of search engines.
…
It’s rather embarassing, really, to have your semi-profound adolescent musings completely exposed, availible for anyone to read at any time so long as they know your first and last name, but there’s really nothing I can do about it.
…
Like it or not, I’m immortalized, and I really pity the fools on Myspace who have unique names, or even the ones with common names but specific addresses (or other identifying personal info) posted. In all liklihood every single trivial fact, every single inane/insane rant has been archived *somewhere* and it’ll eventually turn up in a Google search. It’s irreversable–it’s a gigantic bell that simply can’t be un-rung.
Interesting stuff. I suspect that we are only beginning to understand the social impact of these sites (or even the Internet, for that matter).
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