Saturday, June 23, 2007

What's the point of MySpace?

I want to be down with kids, so I signed up for MySpace. Actually, truth told, I was investigating/cyber-stalking someone and found they had a MySpace page with photos and I couldn't see the pictures without signing up. So one way or another, I now have my own page.

At the moment I have a grand total of no friends. Getting "friends" seems to be the thing to do on MySpace. I've had a couple of people email me asking to be my friend, it seems that the standard thing to do is to agree and then leave a wee message on their page saying "thanks for the add". After that I'm not quite sure what you do with your "friends"? Will any of them buy me a pint?

All three of friendship offers so far have been from musicians or bands, two in Finland which kinda makes sense, but one from a funky dude in NYC. One of the Finns, a female singer-song writer, is VERY pretty (see pic above). I'd like to be her friend, but I suspect all the attention I'll really get from her is email updates as to when her newest release will be out. Best of all, a Finnish hardcore metal band "Skavenger" want to be my friend! As noted in a recent post, I think metal is pretty sad, and I don't get why death-metalers want "friends"? It's not very 'core is it?
DIE! DIE! YOU'RE ALL GONNA DIE!
DEATH! DEATH! THE APOCALYPSE IS COMING!
But, in the meantime would you like to be my cyber-buddy?
Perhaps they just need more people to ritually sacrifice to the devil or something? Anyway, if you have a MySpace page and want to be my friend - but aren't going to try and sell me some CDs, please email! And if I'm missing something else about MySpace, do tell.

And am I just getting old, or is MySpace the most ugly, god-awful piece of page design on the internet?

5 comments:

مارية said...

Ha. That's how I got suckered into myspace, I wanted to see somebody's pictures! With the exception of a couple band pages, everybody I have as a friend is somebody I know in real life. For some reason it's easier to use myspace than regular email to keep in touch plus it's fun to browse through my friend list and check out everybody's pictures and see what they're up to.

Anonymous said...

i think everyone has moved on to facebook nowadays toby... myspace has been taken over by charlatans, hucksters and pornsellers. Saying that, by everyone I mean everyone under about 28.

Anonymous said...

Interesting viewpoint to the issue can be found from dahah boyds blogpost, www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html. It talks about the class-aspects of these sosial network sites (yet not so much of their usefulness).

sharkbait said...

Frankly I think all social networking sites are a waste of time and energy. I have to have a myspace page so I can get updates about my capoeira group. Its annoying to have to do that rather than just getting emails.

Anonymous said...

I was wondering the same thing myself. In fact, I found your blog by googling "What's the point of MySpace." I always felt too old for MySpace. I have a page, but I have no idea what to put there or why. Maybe there is no point.