Preece

Sociability

Jenny Preece, in her book "Online Communities", evaluates communities based upon three P's: Purpose, People, and Policies. An evaluation of Myspace using this system yields valuable insight into the development of the community.

Purpose

From the Myspace Terms of Service:

MySpace.com is a social networking service that allows members to create unique personal profiles online in order to find and communicate with old and new friends.

Preece says that a clearly defined purpose is essential in order for a community to exist. While the purpose of Myspace is very broad, there still exists the defining principle of social interaction.

How this extends to the music side of Myspace isn't as clearly defined. Since the terms of service apply to both the individual and music aspects of Myspace, one can assume the purpose extends as well. Therefore it can be assumed that the purpose of Myspace Music is to promote interaction between artists and individuals.

People

First and foremost, no one under 14 is allowed to be a registered member at Myspace. The Myspace Community consists primarily of individuals under 22 years old. However, the Myspace Music Community is slightly older with the average member being 25. With more than 32 million members total, its difficult to generalize the people who make up the community. However, looking at the top bands, the conclusion can be drawn that mostly white, teenage to late twenties, individuals comprise the majority of the community.

However, the fact that no registration is required to view profiles or listen to music further complicates a generalization of this community. Arguably hundreds of millions of individuals have some bearing on the community. Though these people can't communicate to the fullest extent possible, they still play an integral role, bumping artists up the charts.

Its complicating too because Myspace splits artists up into three categories: Major Label, Indie Label, and Unsigned. These categories automatically split the community into different hierarchies with different aims.

Policies

Myspace is governed by a Terms of Service and Privacy policy, however these policies are hidden at the bottom of the page and are sometimes in confusing, difficult to understand legalese.

However, Myspace employs a two-tiered system to prevent any infraction of the terms of service.

Individuals can block certain users and moderate their message boards and blogs, deleting any offensive posts and comments. They are also allowed to moderate and assign moderator status to groups they create Beyond this, however, their powers are limited.

Administrators exist to enforce rules where individuals cannot. They exist as part of a Customer Service branch established by Myspace to ensure the continuation of the community. They can ban members from Myspace, delete profiles, change user IDs and take whatever action is necessary to regain control

However, it becomes difficult because the Terms of Service don't spell out all infractions. What constitutes offensive material isn't clearly defined, as well as many other terms.

But Myspace gets around this by saying they have exclusive rights to deem anything a member posts as offensive, illegal, or inappropriate. From the Myspace Terms of Service:

Content Posted on the Site. a. You understand and agree that MySpace.com may review and delete any content, messages, MySpace.com Messenger messages, photos or profiles (collectively, "Content") that in the sole judgment of MySpace.com violate this Agreement or which may be offensive, illegal or violate the rights, harm, or threaten the safety of any Member.

Usability

Preece also gives us a convenient way to analize the usabilty of a community (134). Good usability is key to the development and sustainability of a community. With poor usability, the community is likely to implode upon itself. Let's take a look at the usability of Myspace Music.

Consistent

Myspace's biggest failing is its lack of consistency. Individuals are given free reign to customize their page with a variety of colors, backgrounds, fonts, flash animations, music, video, and other things. All of this leads to glaring usability problems. For example, This band has customized their page with a video that starts playing at the same time the music does, creating confusing navigational problems.

All of this creates a dichotomy in the community that's hard to over come. With millions of users connected together, its difficult to foster a sense of community when such differences are allowed.

Controllable

With Myspace, users maintain a level of authority over their own profiles. They can delete posts, moderate the comments board, allow certain people to see their blogs, and moderate groups.

However, the administration of Myspace maintains exclusive rights to edit or delete any information on any page for any reason. Also, they maintain the right to boot anyone from the community for any reason.

Predictability

Myspace is not predictable. There isn't a moderator go through in order to post a blog post or a comment. There is no prior restraint on what is written or how a page is formatted. Therefore it's impossible to know exactly what will be said.

Obviously, Myspace has some usability issues. A look at the Myspace Wikipedia entry shows many complaints:

Many people enjoy the freedom in MySpace to express themselves by customising their profiles. However, this freedom permits malformed HTML, CSS, videos, or Flash animations in profiles. This can sometimes render unreadable text or loud music, and may strain system resources or even crash the web browser. While most malicious code is filtered out, some users have still found ways to insert disruptive HTML.

In July 2005 Kuro5hin reported a cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on MySpace [1]. In October 2005, a user, "Samy" exploited this vulnerability creating a worm which added millions of people to his buddy list, and forced MySpace to go offline for maintenance [2].

Chain letters and messages that claim that MySpace will charge money or shut down if they don't pass the message around, circulate the user bulletin boards. MySpace solves this by saying "You dont need to pass any silly bulletins around to 'save' your account. We don't delete accounts for being inactive. You will never have to post a bulletin to save your account, that's nonsense. If you got deleted, it's because you're underage or broke the rules.". Users are also spammed with other sorts of chain letters that can sometimes be hateful to different groups of people or even threatning. Usually, this is only a problem for newcomers to MySpace, who have never seen any message of the sort before. Regular users on the other hand, usually recognize them for what they are and skip and or delete the messages, while others report those who post them.

Many people use the picture feature on MySpace to display nudity although it is against the rules. This is a problem because the oldest you have to be in order to set up a MySpace profile is 14, and any viewers under the age of 18 who don't have a MySpace profile can still see a user's main picture.

Some users experience chronic login problems.

The site has many coding errors that have not been fixed, despite being pointed out many times (such as off-by-one errors in the number of discussion pages or replies in groups)

Users commonly experience error messages such as the ubiquitous "Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred. This error has been forwarded to MySpace's technical group."

MySpace is sometimes slow or/and unresponsive.

As with other websites of the like, Myspace profiles contain people of questionable nature who propagate drug usage and confess to being habitual users. Some members even try selling drugs on Myspace. The users simply post bulletins that are sent out to multiple users at one time about what they have available for sale and how they can be reached.


These issues may threaten the sustainability of the community.