You know her.
Her name is cutiemonica or Krystal or xxxBabyxxx and she has one pic, 250 guy friends, and absolutely no profile bling whatsoever.
And she's the hottest girl you've ever seen.
Oh, and she's got a link to the site where she keeps all her "real pics" or her webcam or where she keeps all her spyware... umm... I mean... *fun stuff*.
The best thing about MySpace is that it lets users do pretty much whatever they want. Paste 3rd party code? Sure. Link off the site? Sure. Auto redirects to porn? Absolutely.
The worst thing about MySpace? It lets users do pretty much whatever the want.
MySpace has gotten so huge that it has spawned a whole community of bad guys that are trying to game the system.
And just like Friendster before it, MySpace seems to be having some trouble as of late keeping up. I get bursts of friend requests in bunches of 20 from spam profiles, and keep waiting for the day the guy who hosts my free layout decides to switch it out for some animal porn.
That's what is going to threaten MySpace, not the "MySpace isn't cool anymore" factor. Because, MySpace is us... it lets users express themselves however they want.. and more and more users are putting videos, pictures, and yes, even avatars, through other services, up on their page. MySpace doesn't need to be "cool" because we're cool enough and it reflects us. Combine that with a database of indy music events that aren't even located on venue music pages and from a content perspective, I'm not worried.
I'm just worried about getting a virus from having unprotected layout swapping.
As a company looking to enable our users to take our services with them to MySpace's open platform, we have a vested interest in doing whatever we can to differentiate ourselves from the bad guys. On many other platforms, this means being a part of an authorized developer network. I'd love to see a developer network for MySpace. Why wouldn't we want that? Check us out, make us sign stuff... tell us exactly what our code needs to look like and we'll comply in exchange for not having to play "catch up" when security fixes make our widgets do weird things and require code updates. Heck, we'll even give you a blood sample... but we swear, we didn't know that stuff Barry gave us was anything more than a vitamin supplement.
Right now, there's no page of updates for us... no resource to check to see if our stuff is "MySpace compliant." Its just figure it out as we go, and to be honest, bad guys are always better at playing cat and mouse. So let's smoke out the FraudRequest folks and band together to fight evil.
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