MySpace was one the first to give people a glimpse into the success you can have when you give kids/young adults an online paintbrush and allow them to create, with minimal restrictions, whatever they want. A lot of people look at the style sheets on MySpace pages and cringe. But I’m pretty sure many of these people get that same feeling when they drive by a junior high and see what the kids are wearing or hear what they are listening too on their iPods.
MySpace gives kids the unmolded sculpture into which they can carve their own identity. Just like no kid wants to wear a uniform to school, no kid wants to have a pre-formatted template and restrictions on their “identity” page.
So where is the the next shift in online identity? What happens when you take the training wheels off the piantbursh and really let kids create what they want? How about letting them actually own it?
Maybe one Bmodel is flipping the production arrow around and building community around creativity.
From Umair Haque’s Media Economics .ppt
Owning your Space
Good comment by Jeff Jarvis:
but I still say that the issue for MySpace is that it isn’t really my space; it’s their space. And that’s weak glue.
MySpace is not “My Space” it is Fox Interactive’s space full of all sorts of interesting terms and conditions that are worth reading in the TOS.
By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content, messages, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) on or through the Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com, a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services.
For it to really be about identity, people need to own their spaces.
