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The Pentagon Crawls Into MySpace

Those young years can be hard ones. The acne, the awkwardness, the 
angst. That may be one reason why, if you're between your early teens 
and your mid-twenties, you may already be making "friends" in the cozy 
cyber-confines of MySpace.com, the social networking website which bills 
itself <http://www.myspace.com/Modules/Common/Pages/AboutUs.aspx> as "an 
online community that lets you meet your friends' friends." At MySpace, 
each user can create a customized webpage or "profile," upload photos 
(only from your best angle and then photo-shopped to the hilt), blog 
around the clock, and -- most important of all -- court those "friends."

In an eerie reflection of the very world many MySpace scenesters 
undoubtedly plunge into cyberspace to avoid, /the/ measure of success at 
the site is how much you can increase your page's popularity. You do 
this by posting attention-grabbing content, breathlessly soliciting 
other users, putting up provocative pictures to attract attention, 
sending out "bulletins" to your existing "friends," and asking them to 
"whore" you out to their list of friends. With its multimillions of 
"friends" to garner, the site is wildly popular -- and not just for 
insecure teens either.

MySpace has become a magnet for those that want, for one reason or 
another, to draw young eyeballs (and often young pocketbooks). Colleges 
<http://www.myspace.com/auburnuniversity>, corporate products like 
Toyota's Yaris <http://www.myspace.com/yaris> and the Honda Element 
<http://www.myspace.com/hondaelement>, even fictional characters like 
Ricky Bobby <http://www.myspace.com/rickybobby26>. from the movie 
/Talladega Nights/ or fast-food outlet Wendy's minimalist cartoon 
pitchman Smart <http://www.myspace.com/wendysquare> have already gotten 
into the MySpace act.

Early this August, the site hit a major milestone -- 100 million 
profiles 
<http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115490611980828259-O4ZzrfhaMSxyhFoeMI1vn4UUfkc_20060905.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top>. 
Even including those corporate-sponsored sites and fictional pages, 
that's still a whole lot of would-be /friends/.

See the whole article at: http://tinyurl.com/g9xbb

Bill Richards

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