I joined Myspace about a year ago after a friend of mine mentioned it every single time we saw each other. I put up a picture, made a little profile, and immediately started receiving friend requests.
For the most part all of my friend requests at that point were from people I was actually friends with. There we quite a few people from my office with pages who asks to be my cyber friend, and then people I knew from college starting coming out of the woodwork in droves. I was able to reconnect with tons of people that I thought I would never been in touch with again, and have managed to a great deal of decent networking on the site.
One of the features of Myspace that made this all possible was groups. There is a group created for the dorm I lived in while I was in college, and a group for people who I work with. I image people found my profile through the group and then asked to be my “friend” based on that.
After an initial huge influx of friend requests the sort of tapered off and I haven’t done much with the site for the past 6 months except use it to email a few people that I didn’t have stored in my address book. Recently however I have started getting a lot of friend requests and group invitations from businesses. The first one was a bit peculiar to me, but then another followed it, and then another…Businesses have started using Myspace as a way to bring in more business.
A few friends of mine run websites of their own and have used Myspace as a tool to bring in more web traffic. Both of them run music websites. With them I could see someone actually wanting to be associated with a local music scene or a particular magazine, but the friend requests I’ve been getting are for things like new iPod cases and shoes. They are outright advertisements for products.
I feel like using a social networking site for your own personal advertisement defeats the purpose of the site, and if allowed will eventually fill the site with ads not networking. On the other hand it’s a pretty smart marketing tool, Myspace has worked for bands for several years now, why not shoes?
What do you think?