Too much privacy on one website, and a clueless webmaster that didn’t know what a LAN party was on another. The third site had a more than savvy staff and a marketing approach that was far too aggressive. Trying to make money by using those click through ads never works. It’s naive to think that you can make money that way, and it alienates the members.
Determined, I turned to the most popular social networking website to see if it could be adapted for the applications that I needed. I joined MySpace. It was nothing like I expected. Myspace runs like a rusty row boat with one oar operated by a drunken hamster. But it is fun as hell. There it is. You got to go where the people are. The BBS was where it was at in the early 90’s, then it was AOL until 2000, after that it was all about Yahoo chat rooms. Lately – it’s MySpace.
My Space gives you several pages. You get the obsequies friends list with the option to subscribe and read friends blogs – or not. You can choose favorites or even collect blogs to read as a subscriber without actually “friending” the writers. You can post pictures and your profile page gives a space to put descriptions of your life style, blurbs about your interests and there are boxes where you can indicate your favorite books, movies and heroes. You can add an endless variety of backgrounds, photos, music and video clips to the page. It’s a way to have a free website that is completely customizable within a few minutes. You can lock your profile as private so that only you can see it, or just your selected friends. You can choose to screen who friends you, and you can filter out bots with other easy to use security features.
The match up features are the best part about MySpace. You can filter or browse the profiles of other people by interests or location. The discussions and the traffic is lively. You can send a group email to all your friends with another feature called a bulletin. There are many groups that gather around public or private forums to discuss the world’s problems. Within hours I had more friends than I did on both my Live Journal blogs combined.
Like all good things that mean progress Myspace is controversial. People complain too much. Most of the complaints are about how kids are doing bad things via Myspace profiles. They are seeking out sex and drugs as they always have. It doesn’t matter if it is at “that park” or at “that street corner” the way it was years ago. Now “the streets” are online. Bad kids are going to find ways to do bad things. Myspace is no different than any other sector of the internet or life in general. Does anyone remember how Yahoo! got so much flack a few years ago? Some things never change. People don’t like to watch their kids. They don’t like to take time out to spend with them, and when the babysitters like TV or the Net become providers of every sort of content the resource is blamed instead of the parenting. To that I say :Yawn:
I’m a mature female journalist, I like Myspace. I am an adult, I enjoy adult pass times. MySpace has been a great networking tool for my business. In that pursuit I haven’t come across anything seedy – because I am Not Looking for Trouble. People should take responsibility for what kids do online, and for what games they are playing. Keep the censorship off my toys dammit. I’m entitled to my good times.
MySpace may be the devil we know today, the devil we don’t know will come for certain tomorrow. It may be a choice between the lesser of the evils of social networks. For what I wanted to do it has been unbelievable. I have meet hundreds of female gamers, and I choose who I friend very carefully. I’ve started a network of terrific female gamers, clans and game developers in only three months. I filter the spam and in my profile I am very clear that I am not there for relationships. I give Myspace a rank of Half-Demon, and a score of 9.
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