I think MySpace promotes the idea of Six degrees of separation ;)

I don't think it would, even if I had a MySpace page. Those types of 'connections' are meaningless to me.

Myspace is no different then Answerbag. They both are impersonal means to connect with people around the world and developing a remote networking relationship. Neither one makes me feel as special as my face to face friends.

Tom explained it a few months back in a blog post: "myspace began back in 2003. our official launch was january 2004. at that time, we used a 'network' concept to show you *how* you were connected to friends. if dave knows john and john knows amy, then dave could see amy in the network. when you'd view someone's profile it'd show if you were friends, or how you were connected to a person ... within a week (or maybe even less time, hard to remember), we realized that this 'network' concept was really hard to scale .. the site was slowing down trying to process this relationship each time you viewed a profile. in fact, i later heard from a friendster developer that this is what slowed them down for the first year. to keep the site running fast, i decided to just get rid of the networking code and let everyone view everyone else. it took all of about 5 minutes for me to realize that users preferred this greatly - you guys are very vocal! within minutes i got a ton of comments and emails supporting the change. it turned out that very few people were interested in the "degrees" of friendship or the concept of the network. the network concept, btw, is also where me being the first friend came from. when myspace began and we had very few users, i made myself the first friend so that people could see each other on the site - when you signed up, everyone was connected through me. if a user wanted to only see a network of people they actually knew, they could just remove me as a friend. after a year or two users began to request private profiles. in some sense, that brought back the useful part of the network concept. if you wanted to be 'invisible' to someone on myspace, you could just set your profile to private or friends only... and that's that. so long extended network, you were a good friend!"