After you've explored MySpace a bit, you'll notice under each member's # About Me# section are pictures of eight friends, along with a link to that member's complete friends list. By default, the eight pictures displayed are the first eight friends added by that member, known in MySpace parlance as the Top 8.
You can shuffle your Top 8 to add zing to your profile page. Take your most influential or well-known friends and move them to the front by scrolling down to the box labeled #My Friend Space# and clicking Change my Top Friends. Seek out more authors or experts in your field, and request they add you as a friend. Move them into your Top 8, too. This is a valuable cross-promotion tool because it boosts your exposure among readers in your target audience.
If you're really popular on MySpace, don't limit yourself to just eight top friends. Click Change my Top Friends, and on the top left corner of the screen you'll see a drop-down menu where you can increase the number of Top Friends displayed on your main page to as many as 24. If you'd rather display fewer Top Friends, you can reduce it to four.
Author Marcy Dermansky creatively used her MySpace Top 8 to help promote her debut novel Twins. Drawing from her 3,000 MySpace friends, Dermansky found several with names matching the character names in her book, like Lauren, Chloe and Smita. She moved them to her Top 8. For the more unusual names in the book, like J�rgen and Yumiko, she had to search for new friends using MySpace's search engine. New friends who got invitations were so intrigued about the book, they often bought it simply to read about namesake characters, adding to the book's buzz. See: