MySpace Mondays: Own Your Friends Review

I’m going to start reviewing the applications of MySpace I come across that I think have some value. Most of them have a serious fun factor — did you really think any of them were going to be actually useful — but there are a few of them that truly extend the profile.

The first is Own Your Friends. This is a fun application, it now has close to 900,000 installs. Staggering.

Own Your Friends is an application where you can buy your friends, almost as trading cards. It works almost as a market model where every time a friend is bought, the price goes up. Of course you also get rewarded for visiting the site every day, sending bulletins, inviting other friends, and giving your friends to others as gifts (the real secret of the application to making money).

However, if you are really into watching your friends’ number go up on MySpace, this is the application for you, because you’ll come back just to see how much you are worth a few times a day (I know I’m doing it on a couple of accounts just to try it out).

Like most of the new applications, the usability has a lot to be left desired — it’s not designed to really take advantage of a limited space, and on the canvas, to fully see everything I had to turn my monitor vertical, and even then, I had a scroll bar. I would offer to help redesign this application just to make it better because there is a lot of low hanging fruit in this one.

From a monetization standpoint, this application is all about page views, because there is really no targeting that can be done, so the application developer is going to have to figure that out. Also, the stability of the application lends itself to the suggestion that this is a homegrown application by someone that has never seen the traffic MySpace can generate.

There are some ideas that could come out of it.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

  • Usefulness: 1
  • Usability: 2
  • Fun Factor: 5
  • Stability: 2
  • Monetization Opportunities: 2

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