I'm gonna wax a little philosophical, a bit historical, and maybe a tad sentimental here, so feel free to just skip this post.
I got a message from Rhonda a short while ago, just saying thanks for the support, despite the fact that I'm not really affiliated to the MDP Team. She's right. I'm not invested in this - I don't work for a company that plans to use the platform. I'm not a power developer, hoping to leverage and monetize on my coding.
I'm a bartender in a podunk town, with nothing riding on the MDP except perhaps a place to kill a few hours.
I signed up for a Myspace account about 18 months ago, not because I wanted to meet new people or 'cause all the cool kids were doing it, but because I'd just moved 3000 miles away from the place I still call home, and my friends said we could use MySpace to keep in touch.
We haven't, not really. Yeah, we send a message now and then. Once in a while, someone posts a blog about what they're up to. But usually, we just pick up the phone or write an e-mail.
Sure, I'd like to write that million dollar MySpace App, that buys me a plane ticket back to LA, back to the bittersweet air and lovely sunshine.
But really, I've got no expectations. I've got nothing riding on this. I've got no affiliations.
You know, one of the first things I did when I got my account was poked around the menus and buttons, looking for the place where MySpace let you do things like change the colors or set the backgrounds or whatever. You know what? There weren't any. MySpace didn't hand that to you. They didn't make it simple. 18 months ago, all javascript was disabled, Flash embeds were locked down tightly, and they didn't even have that "style" section for CSS they do now.
And, yet, somehow, people had all sorts of personalizations and customizations. There's got to be a few hundred sites dedicated to nothing but cut-and-paste code.
Because what MySpace did was leave a little window, a small place that, with the right kind of creativity, could be used to do incredible things. I've seen some damn impressive layouts on Myspace profiles. If those had just been normal websites, I'd probably find them less impressive. Because, so what, you had all the options in the world, WYSIWYG editors, complete access to all the scripts, plugins, and code you wanted. But do that, here, through a tiny window; that's genius. Put us in a box, and the smaller the walls, the more impressive that genius makes the wallpaper.
And, what's funny, is that if the MDP Team announced tomorrow that this was it - how it is is how it's gonna be, no more APIs, glitches and all, there would still be a group of sluggers here, punching code and making it work. The guys who've been in the trenchs, here, the Josephs and Jonathons and the others who don't whine and moan about being limited, about not having enough of this or that, but kick around code, get creative, get crazy, break their apps and fix them only to break them again, throw up code bits, listen to other suggestions. They'd be here, still, fighting the glitches, pushing back those limits, being that kind of genius, making that wallpaper shine. They'd make it work.
And I'll tell you this - they'd make it fly.
Virality isn't a construct - it's not a specification, it's not an interface, it doesn't breathe binary. Virality, in its totality, is not a business plan, it's an unruly child who'll kick you in the shins if you let it, and sometimes you gotta, because it's how you learn. MySpace has been a breeding ground. Several hundred sites, dedicated to filling in a gap that MySpace didn't support, didn't push, didn't ask a soul to do. That's virality. And sure, it's bitten back - MySpace has taken its hits, been called the *** runaway child of social networks. An unruly wild west of people doing things that other poeple might not like. Because you don't push virality. It pushes you. You let Apps dictate their spread, you're pushing back. And the people doing the things you don't like them doing aren't going to buy that. They don't swing that way. We do it our way.
Virality is the moment a motion because a movement.
Because this is ours. We took that tiny hole MySpace left, and went crazy, pushed it, made it ours, and we'll do it again, with this platform, however it turns out. Because it pushes us. And when its hard, it means we had to do the work, we had to sweat the blood, and at the end of the day, when all the pencil pushers, academics, and those looking to package that instinct belly up to my bar to drown thier diatribes, they'll never understand that we never wanted it easy.
Because you making it easy, you telling me how it should be done, makes it yours, not mine.
I'm not affiliated. I've got nothing invested. But out there in that imaginary land of 1s and 0s where a profile page exists with my name on the top of it, that's mine. That's my little bit of genius. That's the end result of true virality.
That's my space.