Indeed myspace turns out to be a bit of a scam. They make money off their users every day. Especially users like you who have artistic vision to share.

thanks lexy
im not saying they dont provide a great service for bands, but its important to remember we dont own or control the space.

i couldnt agree more to this!
this is a good point you make out of the story, david. we should all be aware of this fact; we dont own any of ‘our’ data we put on these social networking sites.
thank you for your warning.

Well in the end I don’t think a decision like this is all that surprising… you get what you pay for. Was anyone really expecting that you would become the indefinite owner of your user URL by signing up for a free service? For that matter, does anyone really expect that you own any of the resources of any free service you belong to? There is little legal *or* moral obligation to uphold a social service site provided for free.

I think the best thing to do is play the field - there’s safety in numbers. Facebook, Fuzz.com (which is far better for muscians because they have excellent sales tools - all free) and MySpace as well as your own URL. I put my music up at myspace but link to fuzz because there are zero tools for selling and the tool for simply putting music up are next to useless.

Steve

P.S. Loved the show in TO Dave - killer! I was speechless. Thanks for the free tickets once again.

I still believe mailing lists that fans chose to subscribe to are a tool that should be used at least once a month.

Just a tenant? Yes it is so! They on MySpace love to joke.
It has passed more than a year since they deleted my profile (just for the hell of it). And only now I receive the following message:
“You’re losing it, Svetlana! Your MySpace URL - … is about to be taken away, so you may lose it forever. It’s been some time since you’ve logged in and used your MySpace URL. You’re holding a very VALUABLE piece of MySpace real estate, which is the URL you chose.
NOTE: We are only resetting the URLs of inactive accounts. We will *not* delete your account. We are simply trying to free up the username/URLs for people who actually want to use them. Thanks!”
Ha-ha-ha.. of course my absolutely blank page is very valuable! thanks guys, your care (and logic) is brilliant!
Be aware of MS in action!

What’s scary is that anything on myspace or other networks can be erased at anytime. We don’t own ourselves…we are only a product on the assembly line of airspace. While the tool is useful (especially for bands),it is free and that is a bargain we will eventually pay for in the end if “delete” becomes a necessity for the company to run as they see fit.

Myspace gave mobile their page back…

i don’t have the link, but here’s the official statement:

“MySpace has reinstated the registered URL http://www.myspace.com/mobile to the band–this was an error on our part and we apologize for any inconvenience caused. The band’s profile has not been altered in any way.”

sometimes fighting back and questioning the BS DOES work…

i saw that, never hurts to be written up in the wired blog.

oh, i agree!! i think its incredible really, the power of the blog

I’ve been advocating for a long time that people have their primary presence on the web through their own domain name. Even for individuals but especially for people who have a commercial interest in having a stable identity online. Once you have your own domain, you can always move your data to another host if your current one is not working out for for you. The next thing that we need is true data portability to make changing hosts as painless as possible.

They are called mobile though. That’s a very highly sought after page.

I don’t know how many major corporations are going to push to get /trickofdisaster.

Hi David,

With this post and many more of your previous comments (including your message concerning your search for an animator for davidusher.com), you got me thinking…and I ended up buying juliedufort.com!

Before buying my web site, I had 2 blogs on blogspot, 1 page on myspace, 1 page with my internet privider and I am on facebook… This is probably safer than having everything in one place, but it is a lot to maintain given th fact that very few people know about these sites.

Since I now have my .com, I will put everything on it and keep only the facebook, which is a good way to advertise the web site…

Anyway, I wanted to thank you for being so inspiring !

Julie