Modifying Your Top 8

On MySpace, "Your Top 8" refers to the featured friends in your My Friend Space on your profile page. When you first join MySpace and start building your network, the first eight friends will automatically populate this window. As you make more friends, you can opt to prioritize who is in your Top 8.

What this means varies from user to user. Some MySpace fans might feature all their top MySpace friendsthose who actively socialize and participate online. Others might prioritize, based on their real-world friends, regardless of whether they are big MySpace users. Others try to balance all the key people in their life and evenly cover friends, family, and colleaguesor be really safe and top the list with their girlfriend, boyfriend, and siblings, and then be diplomatic and fill the rest of the slots with bands representing their favorite music. A workaround some MySpace users employ is to hack their profile to feature their "Top 20" or "Top 30" instead, or even to hide this section altogether. (For details about how to do this, see Chapter 7.)

In any case, the Top 8 list is very visible and can be a social minefield if not given much thought. Teens are usually very mindful of this, but the question of how they rank people on this list or how much they think about it could be an interesting parent-child talking point or even a teachable moment.