This guy has 10,000 friends.

Ok, now I’m going to say something that might make me unpopular and certainly make you question my sanity. Here it goes.

Myspace is dead for musicians. Dead.

Not that it isn’t the best way to look people up, just by it’s sheer number of users. And not that it isn’t a great way to communicate with friends. But for the musician, it’s over.
Once upon a time, it used to be THE place for discovery of new music. Then, the early adopters came in - NIN, Coldplay were some of the first. And later, Myspace went the way of many of the Internet’s best artist resources - it got played out. Labels began to set up their artists’ profiles manned behind the scenes by marketers and interns in cubes, totally unaware that fans knew better.

Soon, Myspace got cold.

Every friend request was from another musician.
Every bulletin looked the same.

So Myspace now has an SDK where developers can write apps like those on Facebook. It’s still a CLOSED SYSTEM! Meaning once you build up your friends list, there’s no other way to communicate to them but through the Myspace interface. And it sucks!!!!

Do yourselves a favor. Use Myspace as a means to an end. It can be a great tool to spread familiarity, but if you really want to communicate, it’ll be time for bands to start setting up their OWN networks.

As some have said, social networking is becoming a feature, not a destination. The bad news is that we’ll see more networks. Worse news is that we’ll see networks of networks and network aggregators. More of these little widgets and the proliferation of Web 2.0.

I can’t wait till Web 3.0 - when the net does my networking for me.

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