Newsweek recently confirmed rumors swirling around the blogosphere that Tom Anderson, aka your first MySpace friend and founder of the social network, has been lying about his age. Tom was apparently in his early thirties when he started the site, not 27, so that now puts him at around 37, not 32. TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington seemed particularly put off by the lie, noting in TechCrunch comments:
It’s a lie that is perpetuated and amplified by the fact that Tom is everyone’s first friend, from 13 year old girls on up. And there is significant irony: if you can’t believe what you see in the founder’s profile, then you really can’t believe anything you see on the site.
This situation still begs the question, “Who cares?” First, Tom’s not really your friend. He’s an Internet simulacrum of a friend, a nice little default setting who happens to be founder of the site. Yes, he’s a real person and a prominent one, but how much interaction does the average MySpace user have with Tom? Probably none, which makes him mostly irrelevant. Second, why would anyone believe anything on MySpace (unless they’re a 13-year-old girl)? Even if the site can be an excellent platform for self-promotion and marketing, no one ought to believe everything they read on the site. Also, note that gender and age aren’t settings you can hide (as far as I can tell) for individual user profiles on MySpace, so if you don’t want to be forthcoming about either, your option is to lie. Tom’s mistake was not setting his age at “99.”
Yes, it’s funny that the founder of the site, by lying about his age, is actually undermining any potential targeted marketing – like contextual advertising – because his true age puts him in a different demographic. That’s what makes this a little embarrassing for him, but surely marketers know that no user-submitted data is completely trustworthy anyway. And at the end of the day, if MySpace Tom – or any user – associates more with being 32 than being 37, isn’t any advertising targeted to 32-year-olds more relevant to him anyway?
[...] Original post by Sepideh Saremi [...]
[...] Jonas Andersson wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptNewsweek recently confirmed rumors swirling around the blogosphere that Tom Anderson, aka your first MySpace friend and founder of the social network, has been lying about his age. Tom was apparently in his early thirties when he … [...]