The rise of "my"

I stumbled across this article in today’s NYTimes in the Style section, about the rise of “my.” websites – mycoke, mySpace, etc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/fashion/20website.html?_r=1&ref=fashion&oref=slogin

ven at Columbia, we have my.gsb.columbia.edu, our personalized, individual website for information about our classes and other activities. For marketers, they see these sites as a way to make consumers feel valued and attended to. What marketers get by fulfilling this psychological need is valuable data – email addresses, date of birth, name, location, and sometimes even your interests. But is it a fair trade? I think not. When the rise of the “my” started, I figured it must have been an acronym for something, because marketers couldn’t be as naïve to think that simply putting “my” in front of a website would make me like the site, or the product, better. But, how wrong I was! While it may have been valuable at first, to those who understood the concept, the value has since been diluted through over use. “My”, in my opinion, is becoming as standard and generic as “.com”. And besides mySpace and perhaps my personalized Google homepage, none of these “my” sites even feel personal. I may be alone, but I am not a fan.