Fans are the core public social relations in Myspace since day one. At least, the original vanilla version of Myspace as public community was made up of music artists surrounded by their fans. In Myspace, fan relation is just a special kind of friend. It's relatively easy to get friended as most artists really pay attention and take care of precious fan relations. More interestingly, aggressive artists often send add friend request to "steal" fans.
in early days, fans didn't exist in Facebook. The vanilla Facebook never cared much about virtual relations in virtual community. Facebook differentiated from Myspace by focusing on physical world relations happened in campus. Last year, in the game of Myspace catching up, fans feature was finally added.
Fans in facebook is a dedicated feature and it is an explicit social relation, while in Myspace, fans are implicit "friends" to the artist. Mixing regular friends with fans, the cons is that two different relations belong to two distinct social circles. However, fans having entourage attitude may leverage such hypersociability. The pros is that fans could feel closer to the artist and could easily make entourage relations once the fans can be mixed with the artist's personal friend circle and perceptively involved. In Myspace, the entourage relations is perceived though top friends and message board. It can appear hypersocial but the relation indeed helps the artist to build fan base.
Hypersociability could further allow fans involve into artists creative activities. From different perspectives, today artists may explore transmedia approach. Some artists in Myspace provides music sample loops and ask fans to do the remix. The remix later got posted on the message board for share.
