Friendster, Myspace, Etc.

I recently got an email from the person who works on RSS on MySpace.

It is a better RSS to MySpace converter than the one I worked on MySpace Feed. It has better formatting, and uses redirection so that if you click on the feed headline it will bring you to the actual story.

Apparently, the other way of doing this, namely to use Flash (and Spring Widgets), no longer works because you cannot do outgoing links from Flash.

I fixed two bugs in my MySpaceFeed software that caused the output to look bad (unneeded line break, and it would split words in half).

You can get the new version (1.01) at www.myspacefeed.com.

MySpace Feed - uses Magpie to convert RSS feeds into images for use on MySpace, Friendster, and other sites that don't allow you to have RSS feeds.

MySpace Feed
Click on the Download Source Code link at the bottom.

If you are interested in doing changes (which is totally fine with me), please post on the forum so others know about it.

I haven't put so much work into it, because I'm still not sure if that many people are going to use it. However recently a couple people have emailed me to express interest.

Two new open source social networks have just launched. They branched off from the same code-base and thus share a lot of the same functionality. PeopleAggregator (for information about the software) or try PeopleAggregator out is a bit more grassroots and GoingOn is more corporate.

The Mercury News has a story about them.

I'm predicting that in the next five years, ten million young people will be using a online social network similar to Second Life. It's going to be the next MySpace/Friendster.

I think the time delay will be due to the fact that Second Life still takes a good deal of computer resources (at least I'm suspecting that if you don't have a decent video card it will be slow), so it will take a couple years for the computers to get up to speed, someone to hit on the perfect balance between features and ease of use (Second Life is probably too complex), and luck.

Check out Second Life. It's an online universe where you can design your character, meet people, do things, and it's absolutely huge. It's free too. There is a game economy that converts to the real-world economy - an actual exchange rate for game dollars to real dollars.

I created a tool that lets you convert a RSS feed into an image. Then you can include the image in your MySpace, Friendster, or other page. This could be used to include headlines from your blog (or LiveJournal, or many other places) in your MySpace page.
MySpace Feed

An excellent essay on why MySpace is doing better than Friendster

The basic argument is that MySpace had a flexible tolerant approach to users, while Friendster was cracking down on Fakesters (accounts that weren't real people) as well as more controversial content. MySpace turned into the cool place through sleaze, lettings its user be "bad" but with the safety of pseudonyms, freedom, and bands at a point where Friendster also had major tech problems (outages and slow).

The author has

For a project I'm working on, I have to see a lot of Black Panther veterans telling their political histories and debating a complicated and conflicting set of analyses on what went wrong with the party/parties. But they all agree about one thing: before they ever were part of the party, when they heard about Bobby Seale going to the California Legislature with guns, they knew what they had been waiting for and the beginning of a huge international phenomenon began. Not to fall victim to hyperbole, but a similar moment may have just happened and committed activists have to take note.

Television has been a danger since the beginning. The devil box offered a silver lining: we might just be able to slip a insurgent message (and invitation) through the signal into homes everywhere. Malcolm got it and so did Abbie Hoffman. With the onset of video games, the idiot box got stupider. Now the message was written out in code long before anyone ever saw it - no live camera to sneak behind, no producer fiending to fill his daily hour with content. And then the internet. The potential is pronounced. Indymedia, and the like, became the new way to broadcast upcoming protests. But it is also, in many ways, an anonymous cave that doesn't involve relationship with known characters. Great information sources, like ZMAG and (cough) History Is A Weapon (cough), offer the educational material, but haven't figured out how to assist in outdoor struggle and community building. Meanwhile, the new kids are increasingly plugging in, cell phones, Crackberry, and online social networking.

CampusActivism.org has content that we want distributed. We have several humble RSS feeds. Our upcoming events and new resources are the most popular, however neither is widely used.

So I was wondering how to publicize our feeds using the power of social networking tools like MySpace/Friendster. My belief is that it might be easier to piggy-back on top of social networks, instead of trying to create our own. Creating a network of 10-100 million users would take a lot of CPU power, outreach, and time. At the most basic level, we could encourage people to link from their campusactivism.org user profile to their friendster/myspace one.