At our March General Meeting we were treated to an excellent tour of MySpace, the largest social networking site on the Internet. Some say it has over 100 million users.

Our guide was Dan O'Connor, who has been a MySpace user for the last year and a half. Dan is a musician and a web developer and uses MySpace to both feature his music and communicate with other musicians and friends.

During the evening, he demonstrated MySpace’s different functions and features and discussed his concerns about it being used by minors.

He showed us how easy it is to sign up for MySpace and the number of things it provides. A novice can set up an account in minutes and it is viewable by others just as quickly.

An account page can be bare bones and relatively simple or, if you have the skills, quite complex. It can show pictures and play music and a number of other things. There are even a number of web sites that either show you how to and/or provide the necessary code to add different features to your listing.

You can have a friends list of infinite size. These are people you may or may not know that wish to be listed as friends. Some of the well known bands and personalities listed on MySpace have thousands of friends in their list.

People can also leave you messages and invitations and you can send messages and invitations to your friends.

By default there is no restriction on who can either be your friend or leave messages or comments on your page. A basic account setup leaves the user open to many unwanted contacts from strangers and allows them to list both negative and obscene comments on your MySpace page. That is where some of the problems begin, especially for minors. Young people have a habit of disclosing more personal information about themselves then they should and may be easily taken in by comments left by others.

MySpace provides many selectable options to protect the account holder from most of the concerns but you have to wade through all these and select the appropriate ones for yourself. This can be time consuming and must be done after the account is set up. Most people never go through this process after registering.

Overall, Dan’s opinion is that minors should not be on MySpace. But it is hard for even the most caring parent to prevent this since a minor can sign up and use MySpace from any computer, at any location, and the parent may not even know about it. Also, a user can use a false name, lie about their age, and even post false pictures of themselves.

So, for all its’ capabilities, it can be a dangerous place for underage members even with the efforts undertaken by MySpace, due to both legal and legislative pressure.

There were many questions from the audience during the evening and all were answered by Dan.

Thanks Dan for an excellent and informative presentation.

If you have a minute, visit Dan’s websites at http://www.danomusiconline.com/ and http://www.myspace.com/danomusiconline.