Fake Friends on Myspace
I would probably have posted this on my own site, but my site is being moved to a faster server this weekend, and I’m afraid of losing it. This post began as a frustration with Myspace anyway, so it seems appropriate.
I’ve actually spent a good amount of time puzzling over the friend concept on Myspace. The design of the friend concept is quite odd, really. In Myspace, friends are a kind of bling - kids with the most cool-looking friends on their page consider themselves cooler than lusers like me who only have a couple. Bands and Software companies urge Myspace users to ‘friend them’ so that their myspace page looks more popular. Until just a few days ago (Google cache) there was even a person trying to sell a service for $1.99 a month to ‘friend’ you with good looking fake friends, and they would even leave comments twice a month to make it more convincing. That site http://www.fakeyourspace.com/ seems to have gone away shortly after I found it.
The design of the friend system is an attempt to create a ‘web of trust’ (through the act of ‘adding’ a friend) but it violates a basic rule of the internet. If I try to add someone as a friend onto a page I control (which really just puts a thumbnail pic and a link to that person’s Myspace page in my friends section), they can choose to accept or deny the request. Many Myspace users think of this as completely normal by now - BUT ITS NOT!. When you control a normal webpage, you can put whatever content you want on it, including links to other websites / blogs. You don’t have to ask permission to link to another site! My logic is this: My expression that user X is an aquaintance of mine is a valid statement, whether or not X reciprocates and/or allows me access to post in their comment section. In my opinion, the Myspace friend mechanism is flawed.
(side note)…And if the person accepts this relationship, the default behavior is that they are immediately granted permission to post onto YOUR page, and you can’t even respond to it - all you can do it delete it! As a result, you have a one sided conversation from people who deemed you cool enough to be their “friend” posting one liners about you on your main page.
XFN offers a system of superior design. It’s not going to make much sense to most Myspace users, as it isn’t a service like Myspace, it’s a protocol that can be used to describe relationships between bloggers. XFN is still in it’s infancy, but I suspect that it will one day be integrated into most serious blog engines. Wordpress already has it built in (side note:) I installed Word press on my Mac today and in under 5 minutes I had a fully functional blog. Even if you only decide to use their free service, go try it! XFN allows bloggers (which is really what Myspace users are, though many don’t realize it) to create links to their friend’s blogs and mark those links with a little more information in the link. While most blog engines will hide this HTML from the user, really all that’s happening is a link is made to the other site in the form:
where the tag a href means go to a website specified in quotes to follow, and make the link say whatever is before the last
XFN describes friendship links with the following keywords (elaborated on here): the link is to the blog of a Friend, an Acquaintance or a Contact. You can add a physical modifier: met if you have met the person, but otherwise it’s assumed to be a ‘virtual’ relationship. There are professional attributes: Co-worker and Colleague, as well as for geographical, familial and romantic aspects of your relationship.
An example of the use of the attributes in our example above
would carry the information that this link is to a friend’s blog, a person who I have physically met. The attribute might be used to create a special icon next to the link indicating this status.
The idea here is to begin to describe personal relationships (integral to ’social networking’ as it is starting to be called) in order to allow it to be built into the next generation of the web by defining a standard to describe the relationships between people so they can be indexed and used programmatically. Read about the microformats concept. There are already sites mapping friends geographically on image maps using this system which are pretty neat.
Myspace users are currently a big group, but there are a lot of serious bloggers out there with their own websites (a web domain can be had for as low as $30 a year) who use the web for personal and well as business purposes - the killer social network will of necessity include everyone on the internet, not just those using one free service. Email and the web are good examples of winning technologies, while AOL and Myspace, both attempts to carve out a proprietary niche inside of those winning technologies are destined to failure, though perhaps we can learn something from each of them.
