Sorry, I guess I was taking for granted that everyone had heard about it.
MySpace is a networking website. I'm not positive, but I think it may have started as tool for bands to publicize their performances and music products, but it's more for general purposes now.
It's free, and everyone who signs up gets a personal profile where you describe yourself and list your favorite music, movies, TV shows, books, etc. That profile includes "Friends." Those friends can be actual real-life friends that you already know and who also have MySpace profiles, or they can be acquaintences or perfect strangers who like your profile and want to get to know you better. You can request to be someone's friend or they can request to be your's, but either way, if you both agree, you end up on each others' lists.
Friends-of-friends are considered your extended network. Some guy named Tom is one of the moderators/webmasters of MySpace and is automatically your first friend whenever you sign up. Because of his default friend status, your extended network is automatically thousands of people. If you want a more genuine extended network, you could remove Tom. Some people do; some don't. The advantage of keeping him is that he occasionally posts MySpace related announcements.
MySpace also has forums, both big generic forums and more specific forums inside of Groups. Groups can be created by anyone and help you find people with common interests or that live near you. I haven't joined one yet, but I'm pretty sure that joining a group does *not* automatically make you a Friend of everyone in that group. But, I'm guessing it does make it easier to find people to add to your friend list.
You can e-mail anyone in MySpace, but people on your Friends list get special features, such as leaving you Comments. The Comments are publicly visible but can only be left by friends. They're ways of communicating, scheduling, inquiring, complementing, etc. without writing full-fledged e-mails. I'm not positive, but you might also have to be a Friend to leave a comment on someone's photo page (for which you get to post 12 photos).
People can also post Bulletins. These bulletins serve as brief announcements or ways of distributing "viral" web stuff (like jokes, videos, games, links, etc.) that are visible to everyone on your Friends list. There are also Group Bulletins, which I think work the same way except they're visible to everyone in a particular Group.
One advantage of MySpace is that it is a good way to network, advertise, express, and/or reconnect. I've already reconnected with one friend and one acquaintence from high school. The other advantage is how customizable it is. You can customize the background, border colors, fonts, pictures, etc. You can do this with some HTML knowledge, but there are also whole websites devoted to taking your preferences and creating the HTML for you that you just drop into your About Me section.
This also leads to one of my biggest annoyances of MySpace. It's *so* customizable, that it's very easy for people to design crappy looking pages. Either they pick backgrounds that make the fonts hard to read, or they fill it up with too many pictures, or they load it with so many videos and other bandwidth hogs that it takes forever for a page to load, or they quickly slap something and consider it "cool" just because it's got all their favorite things on there. A lot of people probably trust the MySpace-devoted web sites to customize their pages, but then don't know enough (if any at all) about HTML to clean it up. I needed a MySpace Editor to get started, but then I was able to modify the HTML to make everything look a little neater.
The key to getting a good looking page is testing it out and re-adjusting instead of going with your first preferences. If your font doesn't stand out against your background, change your background or your font color. If you get one or more default pics that states that you've exceeded memory or bandwidth for your graphics, then reduce the number of graphics or get a better web host for your graphics. A lot of people just leave the memory errors up on their page. It astounds me that thousands of people check their MySpace page everyday but either don't pay attention to the flaws in their own profile or can just accept them the way they are.
The other major annoyance of MySpace is that some people accept and/or give out so many friend requests that some people have literally hundreds or even thousands of "friends." Because this bothers some people, some will only take requests from people they know already or at least people that they really are interested in getting to know. Those that "collect friends" look like popular people, and those of us who only have a few genuine friends probably look like losers in comparison. But, not everything is perfect.
If you want to see more and judge for yourself, the link is:
www.myspace.com
If you want to see my profile, it's:
www.myspace.com/umberhaven
