My fatigue

Not as in mine, although I am worn out and looking forward to vacation, but as in fatigue over the word “my.” The New York Times wrote on Sunday about how every new Web site has the word “my” in it somewhere. My Subaru, MyAOL, Mythis and Mythat. It makes me long for MySpace a little bit.

Here’s the problem as I see it. Companies are letting you store information that they’re giving you — information you could get anyway — and telling you it’s yours. No, it isn’t. It’s yours if you had a hand in creating it, or some vested stake in it, or some part in the conversation.

In some cases you do have that. MyStarbucks Idea is a place for consumers to kvetch or just make suggestions. And you can immerse yourself in a “subtly branded experience” on myCoke.

But in a lot of cases, it’s still about the company addressing you, and maybe you getting to make a comment or two. Just because you use the prefix “my” doesn’t mean you care about consumers, just like using the prefix “i” doesn’t mean you put the care into your product that Apple does.

It helps as a signifier, sure, but it also smacks of opportunism (a point noted in the NYT article). And face facts, the kids are moving away from MySpace. It’s still popular, sure, but if we’re really trying to reach the younger demographic, we need to appeal to them, not appeal to what they used to like.

Tom Altman (and others) keep saying that the ideal is to give people a place to have a conversation. Some people have coined the term “wedia” and I like that, although it’s not very euphonious. How about “our”? Our___ could have a nice ring to it.

But rather than picking out a prefix of any kind, how about actually giving users a place to have a conversation, to contribute and to get the content they want?