Russell Beattie doesn't get MySpace. Here's why it's popular Russell. It's because it's anti The Man. All kids look to be outside the norm, outside of what they're supposed to do or how they're supposed to look. Rock-n-Roll in the 70's or Rap in the 90's, etc.

Sure if you're a kid you can go put your photo's up on flickr. It's beautiful and neat and all us web pro types love it and the design is great and all that, but where's the freedom? I can't make it look like me or like my personality? I don't care if what I create looks horrible, I want to convey a part of myself to the community and all these pretty apps don't let me.

So instead I go to a place where I can have a cascading background image of $50 bills, 3 embedded videos, a background song that comes on when you enter, and all my text in white which you which you have to highlight to see since my background image has lot's of white in it. Best of all my parents can't even figure the thing out and have no idea that you have to scroll 8 miles down the page to find the message board where I talk with all my friends.

That's why it's popular. Now of course even those things don't really matter because it's transcended cool and is now simply assumed that you have a MySpace page. EVERYONE is on it, hence you must conform even though the whole point was to not conform and round and round it goes. In 2 years it will be old news and the next big site will come up and we'll all be wondering what the kids see in it when there's so many better tools out there.