Random thoughts on random days

MySpace, The 27.4 Billion Pound Gorilla:

MySpace hasn’t overtaken Yahoo yet in terms of page views (see UBS Comscore Analysis PDF here), but they are a solid second and are ahead of giants like MSN-Microsoft, Time Warner (including AOL), eBay, Google and Facebook.

MySpace also has the sixth largest market share among search engines, even though they aren’t, actually, a search engine.

(Via TechCrunch.)

There’s something that is gnawing at me about the large numbers involving MySpace. I have 4 kids ages 12 to 22 who have all signed up for MySpace accounts but have never used them since. They wanted to see what all of the buzz was but quickly tired of the garish sites that generally populate MySpace. Which leads me to my question: of the 75 million accounts how many are really active? You could easily have the numbers they have and still not really have the volume of actual daily, weekly or even monthly users. For the most part kids do what their friends are doing for a short period of time and then move on. Except for IM which seems to still be the staple of communication among the younger crowd.

I wonder if there is some kind of stat available that tells you how many user accounts haven’t been touched in the last month. All the activity could be akin to rubberneckers at the scene of a 3 car pile up. Everyone slows down to take a look and then moves on.

gapingvoid: the corporate wine blogging manifesto: “…The web is not about techonolgy. The web is not about a new media to market one’s wares in. And the web is certainly not about you.

Remember the following line, first coined by Jeff Jarvis; you will need to rely on it for the rest of your life:

The web is about people.

…The end result of this is, wiith the advent of the internet and various forms of social software, suddenly highly savvy networks of people are springing up in their millions. They’re talking to each other. With or without your permission.

It used to be, you could buy a piece of media, hire some advertising professionals to polish the message till it was nice and shiny, and deliver it to as many people as you wanted, in whatever form you wanted.

But suddenly, you’re now irrelevant.

Now, people can simply ignore you. And they’ve gotten very good at ignoring you. Nobody cares about you or your wine. They’d rather talk to their friends and contacts about wine, they don’t need to hear it from you. They probably think what you have to say is just a lot of advertising-induced lies, anyway. They have better sources of information. And lots of them.

(Via gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”.)

This is what I keep trying to teach to my corporate friends and colleagues. It’s not about eyeballs anymore. In fact it never was. It’s about people. In the pre-internet world someone in my circle of friends would come across a product, restaurant, new music, whatever and tell to the rest of the group either good or bad stories and we’d then have the chance to decide for ourselves. The power of these social networks isn’t about the sheer volume of people. It’s still about the circles of friends that talk about you and your product. The difference now is 50 million people could potentially be eavesdropping.

It would be wise to join the conversation before it gets away from you.