Russell Beattie's MySpace Adventure

Russell took the plunge and got a MySpace account. He provides an in depth review of features and issues.

From the post:

"The crimes against good web design added by the members are pretty astounding, I have to say, but it’s not like it’s MySpace’s fault in particular. This I didn’t realize before - yeah, they could be more draconian like Spaces or Yahoo and only allow specific templates, but hey, I’m all for giving members power over their own page too.

They need to put some serious money into infrastructure, every 5th page I loaded gave me an error. Wow. And I love this error when I clicked on the instant message link: “The IM is busted. It’s not working. It is going to take a few weeks to fix. I will post an announcement when its fixed. -Tom” LOL. Gotta love it."

Russell goes through many of the top level features and concludes:

"So the most innovative thing - and what I’ve read about before and thought was really the whole purpose of the site - is the Band profiles and now blogs. These are very cool -you can browse artists both signed and unsigned, see their profiles, add them as your “friends”, subscribe to their blog, see videos and put their music on your home page. There’s also lists of upcoming shows, and a directory of artists. Very cool stuff."

Final thoughts?

"I guess the next step in understanding the whole scene is to find someone who uses it for real and see what they actually get out of it. What’s the really compelling features of MySpace? Then I’ll be able to best understand what a mobile version of the site would really provide to its users, and maybe, just maybe, grok a bit more about the whole area."