*only available on OLD Myspace
**only available on NEW Myspace
Top Friends
Top Friends is the ability for a person to rank their most influential connections on the site. In my pre-teen days, this meant determining who were your best friends of all the people you were connected with, and proudly displaying them on your page while trying not to make anyone upset with their placement. Today, this allows users to show their most influential connections, whether through being respected in music or media, through being bands that tour together, or by showing artists with similar style or taste in music choices.
"Top Friends" are allowed in groups of 4, 8, 12, 16, or none at all. "None at all" was the least dramatic option back when I used the platform to socialize.
I remember argument after argument of people being "not in their significant other's Top 8" or "being lower than her/him". This is a way that others were able to quantify their friendships with other people. It showed who was friends with who, who thought of you as a close friend, and how many people saw you that way. It was much more personal than I feel it was intended to be.
In NEW Myspace, this feature still exists, but none of my "Top Friends" still use the site. Musicians, however, do use the feature to show influences in their music, friends of their band, bands they tour/toured with, and those that are similar to their style for other users to find available on the platform. It is a much less personal feature today than it once was, but it is a more beneficial tool in the music or media industry, because for them, all publicity is good publicity for their music.
Connection Numbers
This is a proudly displayed statistic at the top of everyone's profile that shows how many people you follow and how many people follow you. OLD Myspace had this feature similar to Facebook's "Friend" feature, but NEW Myspace uses this more like Twitter's "Follow" counter tool, where information is now sent one or both ways instead of only both ways.
This number can show how popular a band or artist is compared to others.
Comments*
This feature was removed from the NEW Myspace, but on the OLD one, it was used regularly like the Facebook Wall feature to show who was contacting you and who you were responding to. This showed popularity or friendships in their most public form. This was the allowed feature until Private Messaging and Chat found their way onto Myspace years later.
This feature is, however, still available on Photos, Videos, or Mixes, but no longer on the profile itself.
Page Views
Page Views are still calculated and recorded on the site. This is something OLD Myspace did to show popularity in your profile without revealing who viewed your site, and the functionality of NEW Myspace still keeps it anonymous, but now tells you when your profile was viewed.
This is a screenshot of my own profile views. Note: I'm not very popular on Myspace.
This statistic can be very beneficial to artists who need to keep track of when they are being followed the most or when their content is being most viewed to show their "Top Single" or to give Myspace information to promote them on their new News Feed-like home page.
Hearts
Hearts are the ability to "like" something that a user posts. Hearts do not show who liked something, but show how many people liked the content. A user cannot "heart" something more than one time, so each heart has to be a unique profile. This is a good way for artists to tally which of their photos or videos needs to be promoted most or is already very popular.
Note: all hearts were reset with the Myspace Reboot of January 1, 2013.
Number of Mixes**, Photos, Videos
This statistic may show how productive a user is in the industry or how often they release new content. This is a self-quantification feature that allows a user to change it as they add or remove new content from their profile. This content is able to be blocked from non-connections or they are able to be "me only" viewable (which is what all my pictures are currently set to).
No comments:
Post a Comment