Ugh. MySpace. Tue. Jul 11th, 06

MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites

This really sucks for the WWW. It’s really great for Rupert Murdoch and News Corp.

I’m getting too worked-up over this. It’s no big deal. MySpace is just the new AOL.

The problem is: when you try and tell MySpace users why they’re hurting the WWW they wait until you’re finished talking and then say, “I have to use it. All my friends use it.”. They don’t understand it’s the AOL story all over again. MySpace isn’t the best site for anything. It doesn’t do anything better than any other site. In fact, it’s much worse than most. It’s no good for Social Networking (which is funny, ’cause that’s supposed to be it’s main purpose) because the Network is corrupt. You can’t have a Social Network if every user is in a race to add every other user. If you want Social Networking, Friendster is still better and bebo is better and there’re new, better options every week. If you want to share photos Flickr is a hundred times better. If you want to send messages, get a fucking email account. Do you know how irritating it is to get an email telling you you’ve recieved a MySpace message from someone who goddamwell knows your email address? “You have recieved a message from ___.” *goes to www.myspace.com*, *logs in*, *checks messages*, *reads, “Hi!! Don’t forget we don’t have class tomorrow!!”*. WTF? How about blogging? Why would you use MySpace to blog when it’s at the bottom of the rung for blogging services? Oh, you want to have a personal vanity site? Well, make one. I’m sure you can’t make one much uglier than a MySpace page! Like to share videos? YouTube does that a million times better. And they’re not alone. The only thing MySpace seems to be really good at is making one feel a part of the herd. “What about the bands! It’s a great place for them to get their music heard!!” Well, that’s a good point. But, now that it’s in the News Corp family, sisters with Fox News, what kind of musicians will stay?

And what about the embedded fucking music? What if every page designer did what these MySpaceCadets did? How much would that suck? Forget about surfing the ‘Net listening to your favorite album–every click would have some new audio track step on your tunes. It reminds me of people who put loud stereos in their cars so they can turn the volume up on whatever underwhelming, overplayed, mega-popular, craptastic EarJunk is current at the time and then slow down whenever they see people on the sidewalk. ‘Cause, you know, everyone *really* wants to know what music they listen to. What’s really bad about it is the music only plays while you’re on that page. Easily overcome by those of us using modern browsers (Read: Firefox, Flock, Opera, Camino, Safari, etc.), but what about all those people still living in the Dark Ages, using Internet Explorer? How many iterations of the browser do they have to have open at a time? I mean, these poor souls probably have like three or four browsers open just to surf the ‘Net.

And what’s with this whole “you have to log in to view this page” shit? What is the point? In a real Social Network it would make sense. But, with MySpace, as soon as you create an account, you have 92,419,153 people in your network. Thanks to Tom. You can delete the little fucker, but he’ll just pop back into your friends list. Even if he didn’t show up there it wouldn’t matter ’cause most of your friends have probably destroyed the functionality of the Network by adding large numbers of complete strangers to their friends list.

MySpace is good for nothing and bad for lots of things. Let’s hope that we’re witnessing the peak and the great feiry crash is just around the corner as all the cool people commit MySpacecide ’cause Ruper Murdoch owns it, and the kids leave it ’cause the parents and teachers are swarming over it like a herd of nazis and Friendster sues the hell out of it thanks to its newly granted patent and bebo.com continues to grow. I mean, come on, News Corp have said they want to turn MySpace into a giant advertising engine aimed straight at the youth demographic. Nobody fucking wants that. I block 80% of all the ads on the internet with my browser, ’cause I don’t like ads online (AdSense, FM and some others are OK, I guess).

I’ll shut up now.

Edit: One more thing. Something I cannot stand and that speaks volumes about the fucked up immature nature of the MySpace “social network”: “Thanks For The Add”. Huh? When I first got a MySpace account, I was coming from Friendster, and wanted to look at the testimonials of some people. Instead of seeing testimonials about the character of these people, I saw lots of “Thanks for the add” and “Cheers, mate!”’s. I was horrified. People were thanking people just for adding them to their friends list? Fucking pathetic. Really sad.

One last add-on comment. If anyone knows of a good social network being formed, one with peer-ranking, social-currency, ability to interact with other networks, all the bells and whistles like live real-time collaboration and media swapping, let me know (slugicide+TFCAU@gmail.com). It doesn’t need to totally scale (the early days of Friendster were tough, weren’t they?) if it can interact with other networks. Let’s see, since I’m dreaming… Woofie is important, but cash money trading would be a nice perk. Oh, it’d be nice if there were an island in Second Life or something just for the network. IRC instead of some lame proprietary chat thing. A wiki playground as part of that live online collaboration thing. And one more important thing. In this fantasy SocNet one of you is going to tell me exists IRL, the nodes help create the net. What I mean is there is some Democracy in the Network. MySpace sucks precisely because it has become simply a tool for advetisers to hawk their wares. Nobody on MySpace wanted that. All the users of MySpace have gotten exactly what they didn’t want. OK, I’m done for reals.

technorati tags:myspace, myspacecide, www, socialnetworking

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