Don't Leave, I'll Be Right Barack

Murder has 0 friends too!

Around 2 pm today, right before I read the headline that Barack Obama had lost 160,000 friends on MySpace, I was gripped suddenly by overwhelming grief. I stopped everything I was doing. The girl who sits next to me in my office asked what was wrong as I wheeled away from my desk, visibly shaken, hand to my heart.

"I feel…an immense pain," I began, "…somewhere…there is much suffering…people are hurting…everywhere…"

A single tear dripped down my cheek.

Apparently the root of all evil in the world is a guy named Joe Anthony, a paralegal from LA who set up a MySpace page for Barack Obama a couple years back when he was elected to the Senate. When they first found out about it, Obama's people only requested that they be able to access the account to stay abreast of what Anthony did to it. But now that the dude is running for president, his campaign staffers have slowly tried to wrest complete control over the page, probably so this dude doesn't post naked pictures of himself on it.

But Anthony wasn't going anywhere without a catfight. When they didn't pay him the 39K he demanded for control of the page, he pissed his pants and changed the password, like the kid who smashes his Nintendo against a wall just so you can't beat him at it anymore.

Call me old-fashioned, but that sounds a lot like extortion. Apparently the MySpace executives that the Obama campaign consulted did too, because they ended up giving control of the page to Barack's people. However, to be "fair", MySpace took every one of the friends that Anthony had collected and transferred them to his other, presumably personal, MySpace page, and Barack had to start over at zero. And that was that.

Tears in his eyes and hugging his teddy bear, Joe Anthony turned back down the lonely road to his normal life, taking 160,000 pseudo-political MySpacers with him.

By the way, why do political candidates have MySpace pages again? Isn't like ¾ of the MySpace population not old enough to vote? And isn't the other ¼ (besides me and my awesome friends) too retarded? I guess to Barack Obama, getting a kewl graphic of glittery, sparkling cherries in his comment section is just as good as a hole punched out next to his name on a ballot next October. I will never understand politics.

Anyway, the latest update has Obama garnering 21,000 new friends on his fresh MySpace page, while Joe Anthony has reportedly lost all of his friends in real life.

[via KNXNewsRadio]
[related my.barackobama.com]

All Up In Your Face, Book

This graph shows the number of users logged in through Thursday evening on February 22. 150,000 Facebook users care more about [Grey's Anatomy] than their friends.

One of beauties (as well as detriments) of the innernet is that it provides marketers and product hawkers detailed information about their target demographics; and it does this better than any other medium (Nielsen ratings, my ass.) What's really interesting, however, is when you see (as in the graph above) how an internet audience is affected by television. Every Thursday the Facebook team watches the activity on their site take a dramatic dive at the start of Grey's Anatomy, and then return to normal levels thereafter (it even rises a bit during the commercial breaks.)

Services like Facebook and Myspace are in a unique position here. Besides monitoring their members actions, locations, colleges, and interests -- they're able to monitor activity because so many members keep the window open all the time. Case in point, this guy:

A Goldman Sachs trader in the UK named “Charlie” was warned by his employer that his visits to Facebook on company time were to stop. He spent, apparently, over 500 hours on Facebook in a six month period. That works out to about 4 hours per day.

500 hours on Facebook. That's a five with two zero's after it. As a trader for Goldman Sachs, he probably made 500 dollars for each of the hours he spent trolling Facebook looking at his friend's younger sister's pictures.

But however much of a time suck these spaces are, now we can verify that bankers and traders are filthy scumbags (or at least, the owners of these services, Mark Zuckerburg and Rubert Murdoch can.) And in as much as Myspace is a "place for friends," its really a place for advertisers to cater their products to your every click. They're providing the most in depth and reciprocal medium for both consumers and retailers to better understand one another.

Now these notions have already been floating around the ethosphere for some time. The advent of a ratings box and the tighter loop that it provided television executives years ago got the ball rolling in the first place. But its interesting to see the cross medium affect -- namely, how the internet effects television, effects advertising. Wowzers, this is a bit too heady for websides.

But generally it begs the question: Does the trader from Goldman really even need advertisements for dick cream and Viagra while he looks at young girls? Whats the point if he's already typing with one hand...

[via Scott Kidder and TechCrunch]