As more and more executives leave MySpace the company announced the most shocking departure yet: the three people icons in the MySpace logo are leaving to join the startup Gravity founded by former MySpace COO Amit Kapur, SVP Steve Pearman and SVP Jim Benedetto.
MySpace co-president Jon Miller said although he’s disappointed by his logo’s departure he said, “If we have no users who will notice our logo has changed?”
No word yet on the people icons’ future roles at Gravity.
It's certainly is an unofficial end to an era: Tom is no more on MySpace. As someone who helped create his puppet alter ego this is pretty depressing.
His latest "status update" directs people to his replacement: Today on MySpace...and doesn't allow comments.
Facebook has added a very cool embeddable Fan Page widget, dubbed the ‘Fan Box’, that allows users to advertise their Fan pages on external websites and blogs. Here’s an example of a Fan Box for my sketch comedy group's Fan Page:
Ironically the Fan Box doesn’t work on MySpace. I tried to embed the code into our profile and it didn’t work as you can see from the screenshot below. I don't know if this is intentional or not but it would certainly help users like me who want to interact with Fans on both social networks.
Reminiscent of MySpace, I am beginning to get hot chick spam on Twitter. I won’t link to the spam profile as I don't want to encourage it.
Anyone else seeing this? I wonder how long it will take Twitter to add a “Mark as Spam” link when a Spam Twit follows you.
Of course I could be wrong. She may really like me. ;-)
Last week Late Night with Jimmy Fallon launched an experiment: How many followers can he, with guests Russell Brand and DiggNation hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, get audience member Bryan Brinkman on Twitter.
Well, so far so good – he’s gone from 7 to over 34,000! But I wanted to know the back story – how did Bryan get chosen for this and what has his experience been so far?
Thankfully, Bryan was nice enough to submit to a nine-question (and 140 character plus!) interview about his adventures so far with Late Night and Twitter.
John Boyle: You said you were on Twitter for just a few months and only had seven followers before all this happened. Why only seven?
Bryan Brinkman: Well i didn't know have friends that used it a few months ago, so I kinda gave up since I didn't feel like anybody was listening. I made a tumblr and had the posts from that feed into the twitter, but that was about it. Of course now plenty of my friends have started using it, not to mention the thousands of followers I have acquired.
John: What were your initial impressions of Twitter?
Bryan: At first I thought "This is just the facebook/myspace status bar, etc", but since then I've realized its a much more intricate with the @replies and other categorizing options. I'm still learning new things every day, but there's something to it that removes the personal level that facebook and myspace have. I find it very tough to fit my thoughts into the 140 characters, so its a fun challenge.
John: How did you get roped into Late Night’s Twitter experiment?
Bryan: I was planning on seeing the show for a few weeks, and I had told friends about it. It turned out someone I knew on the staff got wind I was coming and when the idea for the experiment came out, my name got thrown in as a possibility. So they contacted me before the show and asked me. I found it it was happening for sure about 4 hours before the show aired, so i barely had time to react. It really came down to good luck and good timing.
John: Did you have any reservations when they approached you?
Bryan: I'm a pretty shy individual, so I was very reluctant at first, and got very nervous about being on TV and having so many expectations. After they talked to me for a bit and I realized it would be good fun and also great publicity for my artwork, I agreed.
John: You’re now a Twitter celebrity. Any stories from interacting with the Twitter community?
Bryan: It's been a lot of fun, having people I would've never interacted with talking to me about my life and films is amazing. This interview is a perfect example of that. The community is great, they are always quick to respond and help if i need it.
John: How has your new following impacted your work as an animator?
Bryan: It has brought thousands of people to my website, having a global spotlight on my work has been unreal. Everyone has been really supportive of my work, it's definitely a motivator for me to continue making films and artwork.
John: Has traffic increased to your site?
Bryan: I think Google analytics said I've had a 20,000% increase in traffic, before I was getting maybe 5 hits a day. haha
John: Any thoughts on where this goes next?
Bryan: I'm trying my best to decide where to take it, but I'm not trying to make a quick buck. Ideally, I hope to create a website that can utilize the community of followers I have to work together, hopefully on something art related.
John: Want to plug anything?
Bryan: Yes! Please go check out my films and work on my website @ www.brinkanimation.com [Don't forget to follow Bryan on Twitter too - John]
TechCrunch is reporting that MySpace is building its own webmail product to compete with Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and others.
I’ve thought for a long time that MySpace is essentially creating a portal built around social networking and this is another step in the right direction. Webmail will further ingrain users into MySpace and create a ton of page views to sell advertising on.
MySpace doesn’t get a lot of respect but all they’ve done is create a profitable site with loads of opportunities for advertisers without alienating their group of users. That's pretty darn impressive.
According to TechCrunch Britney Spears’ team has posted a “Web 2.0 Media Manager” job on a Harvard-only private job board.
It’s a smart move to have someone manage these 2.0 networks (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) full time and build relationships with fans. I know the most growth my comedy group’s MySpace saw was when I was commenting on people's MySpaces randomly and leaving comments with Friend Requests. The only problem is that it's a real full time job and I already have one! It just became too much but that’s the commitment you have to make if you’re going to grow your online presence.
The internet is an information vacuum and giving her fans more photos, stories, videos and news will only pay off in the long run. Plus, it will hopefully create a place for her fans to go and learn what’s really going on with Britney as opposed to relying on the popular gossip blogs like TMZ or Perez Hilton that have treated her pretty poorly in the past few years.
