By asking users to rank and display their top eight friends, Myspace gives hackers, viruses, and advertisements the potential to penetrate a critical social radius of each user’s friends. Granovetter’s study of a Michigan junior high school in which students were asked to rank their eight best friends (Granovetter 1369) is strangely prescient of Myspace’s “Top 8.” For casual teenage Myspace users who “just hang out” (Boyd 9) on the site and who are likely to spend much of their time holding comment-conversations with their top eight friends, any piece of harmful code they may have copied and pasted onto their profiles, or any band’s advertisement left in their comments, can be exposed to a large number of people in weakly-overlapping social circles.
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