Coming a day after news of AIM Pages comes word that MySpace launches “myspaceim”. AIM Pages better launch soon, and see some major participation.

Speaking of needing participation, Nick Carr recently pieced together the real new economy emerging from participatory media:

I fear that to view the attention economy as “more than just a subset of the financial economy” is to misread it, to project on it a yearning for an escape (if only a temporary one) from the consumer culture. There’s no such escape online. When we communicate to promote ourselves, to gain attention, all we are doing is turning ourselves into goods and our communications into advertising. We become salesmen of ourselves, hucksters of the “I.” In peddling our interests, moreover, we also peddle the commodities that give those interests form: songs, videos, and other saleable products. And in tying our interests to our identities, we give marketers the information they need to control those interests and, in the end, those identities. Karp’s wrong to say that MySpace is resistant to advertising. MySpace is nothing but advertising.

…Far from existing outside the financial economy, the online attention economy is its fulfillment, its perfection. It’s the place where marketing ceases to be marketing and becomes life.

This was his reply to Scott Karp’s thought provoking take on the question : “what if no one will pay for content?”:

In media 1.0, brands paid for the attention that media companies gathered by offering people news and entertainment (e.g. TV) in exchange for their attention. In media 2.0, people are more likely to give their attention in exchange for OTHER PEOPLE’S ATTENTION.

Karp wonders who will get paid when the interMEDIAries are gone. It’s a good question. I think Nick Carr shared something close to an answer.

Normally I avoid the hype on such things, but this deserves some attention – AIM Pages coming launch signals a return to core competencies. AOL’s chatroom/profile/buddy discovery system was the first large scale ‘social networking’ app that normal folks used and loved. It changed the way we communicated (remember “You Got Mail?” folks?).

What’s so amazing about this you ask? Well it’s amazing it took AOL this long to leverage it’s AIM user base and get back in the game of connecting people.

Ask yourself how do you discover new online friends and how do they get on your buddy list. Think back to 1997 for a second. Remember how you did it back then? Think hard about it. Come back to the present day and watch a teenager use MySpace. Anything familiar?

MySpace is the the second generation (third most likely) of that system from way back when. That’s why some of the digerati dismiss or even hate it so much – it empowers normal folks to use the web for what they want to use it for – communicate and connect – and it looks messy.

If AOL gets their mojo back – and it is social networking that was AOL’s first true blue call to fame – then the space will get interesting. Yahoo!’s 360 is boring and kinda complicated sadly. Will AIM Pages be any different? We shall see.

Shelley Powers is shutting down her primary blog Burningbird, but that doesn’t mean an end to her writing, or blogging necessarily. She joins a growing list of first and second generation bloggers who are moving on (or have said they are moving on). Her blog was one of the few whose comments I frequent regularly and where I’ve connected with some who I can see myself becoming friends with one day. Her passion, compassion, great writing, creating and participating in her environment that welcomed terrific online conversations, and her views that don’t toe the line enabled that. I’m looking forward to what she does next.

Thank you Shelley for Burningbird.