Before MySpace came to be, there was Friendster, a somewhat similar social networking site. But what distinguished the two from each other were their philosophies towards their users. “They had no room for fakesters,” says Anderson. “If a dog or a city or an idea had a page, they would delete it. Could anything better have happened to us? People said, ‘I’m going to go to MySpace because I can do what I want there.’”
From day one, Anderson and DeWolfe insisted that their site maintain a pro-user philosophy. They believed that what they lacked in technical prowess, they would make up for by letting users create their own content, whatever that might be. “We recognized from the beginning that we could create profiles for the bands and allow people to use the site any way they wanted to,” says Anderson. “We didn’t stop people from promoting whatever they wanted to promote on MySpace. Some people have fun with it, and others try to get more business and sell stuff, like a makeup artist or a band, and we encourage them to do that.”
“We’re not deciding what’s cool,” says DeWolfe. “Our users are. MySpace is all about letting people be what they want to be.” Indeed, DeWolfe believes that the whole point surrounding social networking is that the users determine what they want it to be. “My vision for social networks is participatory, visual, based on dialogue,” he says. “They can be as edgy as they want or as square as they want – it’s up to them.”
But allowing users to do whatever they wanted was not just about keeping them happy, although it did that too. It also freed up DeWolfe and Anderson from any content costs and customer acquisition costs. And, it ensured them a place in the future.
“As a TV manager, the best thing to happen is your show gets really hot. But you always know that it's going to lose popularity and become uncool at some point when you run out of ideas or people just get tired,” says DeWolfe. “We don't have to deal with that because we are not creating the program – our users are. They can continually reinvent what's new and what's cool, based on changing their profiles, or new bands coming in.” As a result, says DeWolfe, MySpace does not face the difficult challenge that others, such as MTV do. “There are 140 million different channels to watch on our site.”
MySpace allows users to take on full creative control of their individual profiles. If you want to promote your business, you can. If you want to create a page with black text on black background, you can. You can do whatever you want.
Anderson and DeWolfe also listen to their users when it comes to updating the site and adding new features. “Users told us what they wanted to see, and we just built it. That’s how we do a lot of our updates,” says Anderson. “We catalog what people tell us that they want. It’s not super-complicated.”
So, while some may criticize MySpace for being poorly designed, Anderson and DeWolfe say that is ok, as long as it is the users who are poorly designing it. “They're defining the experience, not us. We're just letting it rip,” says DeWolfe. “What I'm basically trying to say is that as long as we don't screw it up, we'll be fine.”
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