Many people cite MySpace as their most frequently visited website this year.  This comes as a fairly new thing; of course, MySpace is not new, but its popularity and usage are booming.  The question, then, is why is this website more popular than classmates.com or personal websites?  The answer is a simple one, and it translates straight from the real world to the virtual world.  The answer is that networking online is just as enjoyable and as productive as it is in the real world.  MySpace (and Facebook) is the website that brings everyone together.  Though there is an impossibly large number of a total user of MySpace, one can apply the degrees of separation test by going through the friends of friends.  It is exactly this kind of networking that brings everyone on MySpace together.

When a new person joins MySpace, they add a few friends by name; the next step is going through the friends’ lists of those friends and adding anyone that is found there who happens to also be your own friend.  Often this results in a kind of degrees of separation continuum along which you find many of the same friends on each other’s lists.  On the friends’ list of a friend of a friend of a friend, you might find one of your own friends.  Similar to the real world, MySpace, though impossibly large, has a sort of small world feeling to it.  In addition to this culture of adding friends, for older users of MySpace, the website is bringing them back into contact with people that they haven’t seen or talked to in five to ten years.  At the end of high school, everyone goes their own separate ways, but nowadays those old friendships are popping back up, virtually this time around.

MySpace offers the above-mentioned networking feature through friends’ lists, but it also offers comment posting, private emailing and IMing, as well as bulletin posting.  Basically, the email and IM features function the same way on MySpace as they do on any other website or Internet platform, but comment posting and bulletins are somewhat special features.  Bulletins are something like a mass email that is sent out, when you post it, to the homepage of everyone on your friends list.  The good thing about this is that you don’t have to pick and choose people to send the message to; the good thing for the receivers is that it doesn’t come to your mailbox but to your bulletin board.  This means no more clogging up inboxes!!  You choose the bulletins you will read based on their subject line, and the other ones just stay there quietly posted on your bulletin board until MySpace deletes them ten days later.

The other cool feature about staying in touch on MySpace is the comment-posting feature.  What this entails is going to one of your friend’s profiles and adding a comment.  Sometimes these comments are short personal messages that didn’t warrant a whole email, and other times they are a comment not only for the profile owner but also for other friends’ of that person to see.  Sometimes the comments are insulting, having to do with a specific event or with a posted picture.  While this may seem intuitively dangerous, the owner of the profile has the option to delete the comment if they prefer.  In addition, a member can put their security settings such that all comments have to be pre-approved by the owner of the profile before they will be posted.  In this way, everyone can get along and a little jest is sometimes a sign of a lot of love.