MySpace has many great features, but what it all comes down to are your friends.  This is important not only in the sense of simply having the friends, but it is from your friends that absolutely everything on your MySpace page comes.  Your pictures become ten times more interesting once someone has left a comment on them and your bulletin board gets filled up with things you actually want to read if your friends are actual friends.  The key to having a good experience on MySpace is in having and choosing the right friends.  This does not mean that it’s a popularity contest, and that the more; the better is a fast rule. On the contrary, it’s about having the right friends, not about having the most friends.

For example, how many users still keep Tom in their friends’ list even though they’ve never even exchanged a single word with the guy?  He’s a name and a face in the friends’ list, and the more the better, right?  Wrong.  It’s about having friends that you want to be kept aware of their life happenings.  It’s about having friends who will post nice comments about you (or at least comments that are not so nice but that are meant in good, clean fun).  It’s about choosing friends that you have something to say and that are likely to have something to say back to you.  On the other hand, choosing the friends for your friends’ list doesn’t have to be limited to the small circle of people that you were friends with in high school.  Beyond that, there are friends that you knew in college and friends that you now work with.  In addition, there are people who work in the same field as you do, but in another region with whom you can network, exchange ideas and strategies.  MySpace is personal, but its limits lie far beyond the personal realm.

You will not be happy with your friends’ list if you simply add every name that you recognize from your high school.  The result of this kind of friends adding is that you have a large number of friends, only some of which you are actually interested in staying friends with.  Choose the friends who are actual friends, or at least the friends that you used to be very close to and still would be close to today if circumstances were different.  What this means is that you shouldn’t add somebody if you’re not willing to spend three hours with them on a Friday night, catching up.

Along with adding old friends, you can search for people with whom you can network.  This can be done through a general search or through the networking function of the profile.  It can also be done through searching for groups in the field that you are looking for and then checking out the forums of those groups.  Perhaps there are not forum topics that you want to post in, but maybe some of the members who have posted in the forum are people with whom you would like to network or exchange ideas.  The bottom line is that there are many ways to network with people on MySpace whether your motivation for networking is to have a virtual version of your closest friends close by you or if your motivation is to gain professional work contacts.  Either way, think twice before you click ‘Add’ because adding a friend and then deleting them a few weeks later isn’t such a nice way to go.   A lot is permissible on MySpace, but it is not ‘anything goes’–fortunately, at least not yet.

Tags: MySpace Tips on Friend Requests

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