Imagine having the ingenuity and Web design chops to become the next Tom Anderson. Pioneer Anderson, now 31 years young, founded the social-networking MySpace in 2003 to help promote his music. Today, more than 160,000 people register every day to host their own pages, and the site is home to 84 million users. When former English major Anderson sold the company to media mogul's Rupert Murdock, he received $580 million.
Reaching your 14th birthday is the only requirement to create a MySpace Web site.
While signup and hosting is free to all who want to network among friends and soon-to-be friends, not all member pages are equal. MySpace provides a basic Web design template for members to upload images and music files; however, the individual page design itself often reflects the graphic shortcomings of its members. Many MySpace pages are busier than O'Hare Airport and look as if they were assembled by a carload of drunken circus clowns.
Online Graphic Design Classes Can Boost Your MySpace Usability
Bright as he is, Anderson still had to hire Web designers and code writers to build his prototypes. And today, MySpace is a haven for young eyes. Business Week reports that at least 87 percent of people between 12 and 17 years old routinely surf the Web. Many lack the patience to wade though a maze of broken images, crashed files, ugly blocks of text, or the flashing eyesores of competing banners.
Even the most rudimentary online HTML and graphic design classes from a Web design degree program can help you ratchet the most hideous MySpace page into a crowd-pleasing destination. Not everyone needs to complete a computer science degree to benefit from an online Web design class. Instructions are straightforward and classes provide shortcuts to soup up a page until it sizzles.
Adding a Degree of Design Expertise Shows Off Your Talent
Whenever you add friends to your MySpace account, you increase your page views exponentially. Anderson boasts of having added 191,117,683 personal contacts--or "friends"--and counting. A glimpse at Anderson's personal page (myspace.com/tom) reveals a straight-forward clean design, along with a graphically pleasing arrangement of his images and information boxes. But it's not the coolest page on the site. While people can buy templates for their MySpace pages, the members who can tweak the code and use graphic design programs to optimize their images have the most impressive networks.
It's amazing that so many MySpacers who pay close attention to their dress and their personal style have pages that look like northbound porcupines from the south. Broken Web code and poor graphics design formatting are typical culprits. Even people using graphical interface Web design programs like DreamWeaver, GoLive, and FrontPage can benefit from online CSS and HTML Web design classes. Because MySpace doesn't allow images over 5MB in size, an online class in digital design can help you optimize your photos so they not only load correctly, but seize a random viewer by the corneas.
Creating the Next Social Space
So exactly what will put you ahead of the pack as the next social networking guru, à la Tom Anderson or YouTube's Chen, Hurley, or Karim? According to Warren and Jurgensen's article, The Wizards of Buzz, in the Wall Street Journal, social news sites such as Digg.com and Reddit.com are responsible for a new generation of hidden influencers who "can more quickly distill what's important for busy readers." Your mission, should you decided to accept it, is to identify and capitalize on an untapped cyberspace subculture of Internet users.
That's exactly what Reid Hoffman et al envisioned when they launched LinkedIn, sort of a MySpace for professional adults, in 2003. According to a recent article in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the logical next step in social networking sites has already begun with Web sites like LinkedIn, "a model for a growing trend of business-oriented networking sites." According to Hoffman, whose ad-driven Web site is growing by 700,000 new users each month, "Sites using social networking software allow [users] to post details on a profile, and use it to directly communicate and access information." Another similar adult social networking site is TradeKing, which "allows investors to search out users with similar investment strategies, and dig up more information about them and their stocks before a trade." These sites are not YouTube or MySpace, but another moneymaking direction that this highly profitable social networking industry can take.
To surf this cyberwave of the future, you'll need Web design skills, business acumen, marketing strategy, a knack for divining trends, and a touch of serendipity. With some creativity, web and graphic design chops, and a little online savvy, your possibilities are virtually limitless.