In my travels as a roving Mac technician I was recently helping a VIP customer with their iBook and discussing websites. The subject of MySpace came up (for reasons I can’t say) and I rather unwisely described it as chavvy. Now for the few readers that are outside the UK, the word chavvy is used here to describe primarily lower class people who dress in a selected range of brand name clothes, wear baseball caps and oversized jewelry. It has also grown to mean something that is generally over popular despite being a bit rubbishy and it was this meaning I was implying about the site.
Now, concidering who I was speaking too, I REALLY should not have said this. I think it was because they were so nice to me, I was lulled into a sense of false security. I stand by my impression of MySpace. All the pages I have looked at are naff to look at and have little content. Perhaps I am missing the point however, perhaps its just about the people not the content. Why use MySpace and not a blog site. Is MySpace blogging for people who have nothing to say?
It’s been playing on my mind since (not least because it was a career limiting event), and although I have kind of notched it up as another example of why I’ll never suceed in life, win friends or influence people (its a long list), I think I need to qualify the statement which was made without due concideration.
Over the next week I am going to look at MySpace and try to discover why a hundred million people call it home and why NewsCorps paid all that cash for it.