Myspace is back, new and improved. Now what?
Here’s me.
I Don’t Get Facebook
There. I said it. Let the ridicule begin. Another old fogy doesn’t understand social sites. As my niece says, “What ‘ev’.”
I started social networking on MySpace. Yeah, I know — I’m a little old for MySpace, regardless of what the experts claim. I signed up to see what my daughters were doing online and to see what all the noise was about. Noise is right. MySpace is awash with clashing colors, huge background images, and tiny fonts. And the noise isn’t limited to visual. I’m blasted with bulletins on whether my teenage friends enjoyed their last kiss, whether they prefer Pepsi or Coke, if they’re double jointed, and if someone’s smacked them in the butt in the past week. Let’s hear it for transparency…
I joined Facebook when it opened to non-college students. I liked the clean interface, no soft porn masquerading as dating site ads, and no Bambi’s wanting to be my friend so I could visit their websites. People use their real names so I didn’t have to remember who “<3 Y0ur Fa\/3 [jk]” is.
Unfortunately, Facebook changed when it opened up for external aps. What a mess! With MySpace, if I find a cool widget, I can put it on my profile. No mess, no fuss. When I add something to my Facebook profile, Facebook wants to spam all my friends with requests to put it on their profiles and then every time I change something, spam them again. What’s worse, most of these “cool” apps don’t seem to work unless my visitors also installs the same apps on their profiles. What?!
Of course, my friends are installing these apps, and I’m getting spammed with requests to compare tastes in movies, be a pirate, and see if someone has clicked “YES” on me (oh boy!). I’m ignoring most of this stuff and probably upsetting my friends in the process. So much for Facebook helping me in the friend arena…
Now Facebook seems to think they can publish my online purchases made on other sites. If I want you to know I bought Rogaine, Cialis or just a new Telecaster, I’ll post it here. I don’t appreciate Facebook making money by telling my friends my secrets.
Guess I’m just unsociable.
P.S. Oh, joy! I just logged on to MySpace and discovered that MySpace is going to spam my friends, too.
Update: Hugh Macleod at gapingvoid posts on the same topic, “Why Facebook Might be Consigning Themselves to the Slushpile of History.”
The “aging” MySpace user base
A recent comScore survey claims that the MySpace “user base” is aging, that 55.6% of MySpace users are 35 or older! If so, that would make MySpace one of the grayest corners of the Internet, right behind Canadian pharmacy sites.The survey counted “Total Unique Visitors” during August 2006. In other words, a dad who doesn’t have a MySpace account, but who checked his daughter’s MySpace account once during the entire month of August counts as one “user.” And his daughter, who spent more than four hours every single day of August on MySpace, writing blogs, blurbs, comments, posting pictures, videos and bulletins on her blog, and visiting her 347 friend’s MySpace pages, also counts as one “user.” Okay… If I were looking to place ads online, I would prefer a page views by age metric to determine whether MySpace was a good investment.
I’ll continue to keep my headline “Increasing the average age on MySpace” on my MySpace page.
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MySpace? Yup.
So, I finally got myself a MySpace account. Yeah, I know–at 43 I’m a little older than the target demographic. So what. I’m comfortable with my age. You deal with it. Besides, having a MySpace account allows me to see what my kids are doing (and what’s being done to them). It’s not going to be so easy if (when) my oldest gets a Facebook account.Looking through other MySpace profiles reminds me of the early years of proportional-spaced fonts, WYSIWYG editors, and color printers. Can you say Ransom Note style? Garishly colored or graphic backgrounds provide a backdrop for tiny, low-contrast text and scattered pictures. Where’s the tag when you really need it?
I assumed that I could write some CSS to make my own stunning, understated, elegant profile. I assumed wrong: it’s not so easy with MySpace. I’m back to the default look.
Fortunately, I don’t have to blaze a path. Mike Davidson recently fought this battle. Wow!
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