Sure, if you’re a middle-school student.
Professionals who are looking for networking opportunities can use big-mean-grownup sites like LinkedIn. I’m fairly certain I’d be appalled if anyone I worked with actually had a MySpace page with their real name on it.
A tremendous number of well-known musical artists maintain an “official” Myspace presence. I’ve stumbled upon the the official pages of such stars as Sting, Wyclef Jean, & James Taylor pretty much by accident. I’m sure there are tons of others, and each page contains links to dozens if not hundreds of fellow musicians, fans and acquaintances. Seems like a pretty good way to get pertinent info out so fans can beat the drums about new albums, concerts, etc…and to network with other musicians.
YMMV.
Well I am a web designer too, so using my skills, I redesigned my MySpace page. Using CSS, I basically erased the whole ugly layout and made my own page from scratch. The only thing you are not allowed to get rid of is the banner ad at toip. But if you know what you are doing, you can mave a MySpace page that looks nothing like a MySpace page. (And no I am not talking about those hideous “PimpMyProfile” templates everyone uses.)
You sound extremely snotty. I am a professional and I have a MySpace page. Why? Because first, it has been an awesome way to reconnect with old high school classmates. I am in my early 30s and I have reconnected with scores of classmates. It’s been really fun. Secondly, most of my friends (also in their realy 30s and professional people) have pages. Also about a dozen of my family members have pages (siblings/cousins). And increasingly, I have been seeing my friend’s parents making their own pages! We’re talking people in their 50s.
Why? Because it is a great way to keep in touch with friends and family, and to reconnect with old friends.
The vast majority of people out there can’t make their own web sites. They can’t design a page and they’re not going to pay for a domain and hosting. This enables regular people to have a web presence, and share photos, etc. and keep in touch with friends and family.
It’s not just for kids anymore. Like I said, I am a 30s professional and many of my friends (other 30s professionals) have pages. It’s been a lot of fun reconnecting with so many people.
So if you were my coworker, go ahead and be appauled that I have a MySpace page, but I guarantee you that you would be amazed at how I have redesigned the page so it looks good and nothing like a regular MySpace page.
There are other potetial negatives to My Space as well. One of our clients has the biggest ass for the MIS director. He is an absolute idiot and he got his job because his best friend inherited a company. He is a pain in the ass, blames problems caused by his network on our software* and is generally clueless. One of my co-workers found his My Space page and it looked like a 12 year old with bad taste and a short attention span put it together. Somehow** his My Space page made the rounds and got back to his place of employement which caused him a great deal of embarassment. He was talking shit about his co-workers and various other people he works with. His My Space page was one of the most stunningly stupid things I have ever seen a so called professional do. He put his real name, the name of the company he worked for and other easily searchable terms on his page that identified him clearly while dissing people he worked with.
Slee
*He consistantly has network issues and blames poor performance on our software even after we have proven that it is his network that is causing the problem.
*As far as I know my co-worker had nothing to do with the company finding out about the My Space page. I do know that he got into a reasonable amount of hot water over the page. I was quite happy about that.
I guess one stumbling block preventing me from ever understanding the popularity of MySpace is that “social networking” online in this rather awful way sounds like a horrible pastime, and it wouldn’t even occur to me to want to even try it.
Who wants to volunteer to contact the agents for Sting, Wyclef Jean, & James Taylor to inform them they their clients are all middle school students? :rolleyes:
And, not for nothing but the link to LinkedIn looks a LOT like…why, a grown-up version of MySpace. " Look up old colleagues and college friends" and so on. Please. Pot, Kettle, meet Black. Rinse. Repeat.
Not sure why the snarkiness there, Cartooniverse, but this is the site that led me to the sites of Sting, Wyclef Jean and James Taylor (and Freddie Jackson, for that matter). I see lots of musicians and lots of networking and lots of fans, with nary a middle school student among them.
The difference is that LinkedIn is actually geared towards professionals who are looking for work or to hire people. The site is built around people’s resumes and networks of recommendations, rather than lots of <BLINK> tags, idiotic chit-chat, and music videos.
That is the thing that baffles me as well and it makes me convinced that much of the younger generation is having a fundamentally different experience in junior high and high school than I did not so long ago. We didn’t have cell phones, text messaging, or things like MySpace. I basically understand incessant chatter on cell phones and I have worked hard to understand constant text messaging but I don’t get the social networking things like MySpace at all. I don’t even understand the concept let alone the dynamics that would make something like MySpace a gigantic hit among young people today.
Relax. My remark was directed towards the middle-school comment made by friedo up there, not anything you said. I am in agreement with what you have said here, ok? 
Shagnasty, I’m 44. When I was in Junior High, we had people who stood around and talked about other people. Whether it was nice talk or mean talk, they sure did talk. A lot. Sometimes for amusement, sometimes for clear meanspiritedness. Plenty of damage was done. From what I can see, MySpace is a highly efficient electronic method of doing the same. It is also a lot more than that.
Thanks. I confess I hadn’t read upthread; I simply saw your reference to the musicians I mentioned and thought the comment was probably aimed at me. 
One of my best friends is a criminal defense attorney who recently started his own practice and he just created a MySpace page. A lot of people (including one B-list movie star) have added him as a “friend”. The particular line of work that he’s in lends itself to people needing to have his name and number at their fingertips (when they get nailed for DUI or whatever). It hasn’t been long enough to see what kind of business it may drum up but people are certainly looking.
FWIW he has no annoying music or crappy animation playing.
I’ve been contracting for a “beauty product” type store for a while now, and one of their marketing ideas was to have a MySpace profile. It looks like they’re getting some returns. They have a number of friends that are their core audience (young to middle-aged women) and it helps them advertise new products and discounts. It certainly isn’t hurting… yet, at least.
That said, I can’t stand MySpace, and those were some terrible billable hours.
Then again, I’m reclusive, I don’t like being plugged-in all the time, and I prefer to socialize in person. Chatting over a beer with friends is way preferable. If I want to coordinate a gathering? I’ll call people. Same with all of my friends.
How is having a MySpace business page any more of an advantage over a regular webpage?
Perhaps the same way having a video hosted on YouTube gets it seen more readily than having a video hosted on the big, wide open web.
The same advantage you have by posting this comment here on the SDMB rather than a personal blog at guanolad.com or somesuch.