I heard about this, this is fantastic!

The applications that could be developed, the addons, the bling. I want it and I want it now!

The gist of the story is that MySpace are considering making an api available so that people can develop applications, plugins etc for users of MySpace.

The possibilities that this opens up are endless, assuming that they do a good job on the API and don’t cripple it.

More info at:

cnn

If you look around some of the big web development forums you are bound to find a number of people who are quite down on MySpace resource sites. “Their rubbish”, “They generate junk traffic”, and so on.

I can understand why an advertiser for say a Real Estate website thinks that traffic from this kind of site is rubbish, because to him it is. These kind of sites should not be showing ads for his site, but if they use YPN then there is a good chance they will end up running his ads.

I was recently contacted by Jeff with some questions about MySpace. Jeff has just started a new resource site. Of course I had to check out Jeff’s site, even though I was fully expecting the usual turnkey site that everyone uses.

I was pleasently surprised, and that soon turned to laughter. Jeff’s site has got to be one of the most original sites for MySpace resources out there. The site is tiny, only one page in fact, I sure hope Jeff takes his idea further and expands it.

Anyway if you want to check it out, the site is Crapflood: Unique Stuff for Myspace.

Brad over at smallbusinessbranding.com has written a good introductory text on marketing on MySpace. He has good ideas and does cover some of the techniques you can use to make it less time consuming.

It is an introduction only, so if you want to do it well, and be effective do a lot more research before starting you marketing campaign.

Read the article at http://www.smallbusinessbranding.com/590/myspace-marketing/

The month long ride on FriendStorm is over, The account now has just short of 28 thousand friends. I’m reasonably happy with the result, but I was hoping for over 30k.

I haven’t paid a lot of attention to the other part of the experiment, I have just been too busy with other things.

MySpace is definately a way to bring traffic to your website. You do need a website that suites the demographic of MySpace.

Generic Profile

You may remember that I started this experiment with 5,437 friends on the 20th June 2006. As of right now the friend count on this profile is sitting at 24,179.

I have been using this account to advertise two of my sites. The first one is my new Profile site for MySpace, the results are definately in on this one, The site has been in the black for sometime, see below for more details.

This is an update to Hundreds of new MySpace Friends.

I’ve been on FriendStorm in paid mode now for about 6 hours, my pending friends request queue has 1576 requests in it. I have done nothing else during that time on that profile with regard to sending out friend requests.

The account had 5,437 friends before this started, and I have decided not to do any other friend seeking during the month to see how many FriendStorm actually brings in.

I’m starting to get an idea about a Professional MySpace Marketing Service, I’ll need to ponder on it some more as I approve all these requests.

So on one of my “Generic” profiles I have been using a number of tools to build my friend count. One of them I purchased after I wrote my column on the tools on my pc, which I must update and tell you about.

Another one is an online tool which I am yet to talk about, it has 2 modes, unpaid and paid, until now I have been using it in unpaid mode, but I decided to give paid mode a go, so I subscribed for a month.

The challenge is about to begin. This is not intended to be a quick process, it could take a considerable amount of time to build up a reasonable friend count.

The first phase is to increase my friends list to a reasonable number in the topic I’m interested in. I will end up with people who aren’t interested, but that will be because they have requested to be friends rather than me requesting them.

I won’t be seeking out anyone who is not interested in the subject matter, which for this test is the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP).

Yesterday I opened a new MySpace site, I wasn’t planning too, but I came across a fantastic script and so I thought I would invest in a copy.

Then I decided I’d see how long it took to make it’s money back, so I set it up under a new domain name.

So that Stats are:

Cost of Script: $147.00

Cost of Domain Name: $7.20

Cost of Hosting: $0.00 (Just another site on my Server)

Total Cost: $154.20

Release Date: 19th June 2006 (By my Server, 20th for me)