When I signed up for MySpace a few years ago, I had no desire or intention of making it a place to express myself. I have
my own domain name, and if I were going to express myself somewhere, it should naturally be there, right?
Well, somehow over the years I've added little things to my MySpace page here and there and have ended up pretty much unintentionally creating a distinct impression of myself on the Web.
How did it happen?
It all started with horizontal scroll bars. I've never liked them (who does?). After a while of putting up with large images in my comments blowing out the page, I noticed a friend had done something to constrain the images to a small size in order to prevent blowouts and horizontal scrolling. I wanted it, so dug around and found the code and added it to my page. Voilà!
As time wore on...
- I tweaked the colors a bit.
- I found one of my favorite songs and added it to my page.
- I added some images that are funny if you know me.
- I added a background image and a color scheme that I like.
- I eventually went so far as to add a "splash" graphic at the top (pun totally intended).
Now today, after years of small tweaks, I have
a MySpace presence that says a lot about me, was created by me, and, I'm willing to admit, was instigated by seeing what my friends were doing to their profiles.
The point:
The desire to modify one's profile can be viral.
Food for thought:
- Would facilities for social self-expression benefit your website? It doesn't need to be a social networking site in order to qualify.
- How can social self-expression be facilitated in your website?
- Can customization techniques somehow be intentionally made more viral?
- What could I/you/we do to improve upon what sites like MySpace and LiveJournal have done for social self-expression on the web?
Note:
Please bear with me while I work on laying out the comment area. It functions, but it's not pretty just yet.