my space, our town. most level headed people i know (all three of them) have sworn off friendster and other social networking tools. they've gone so far as to delete their accounts. i've sworn friendster off but keep my account around in case my long lost friend from third grade happens to find me. or if some celebrity decides that we can be friendsters. or if i meet a nice friend of a friend of a friend and we decide it's necessary for us to be linked by less than three degrees. it's also good for keeping up to date on people's love lives. friendster has, and always will have, its uses. here's what i had to say about friendster in 2003:

"but the cool thing about this is that you can see who you are connected to through your friends. so after you sign on and do the requisite question blank answer fill in thing, you can see galleries of who you're connected to. how cool is this? it's pretty darned cool. so sign up everyone and let's see if we can be a whole new world. i will spread the gospel of friendster this week so we can determine decisively if it will be a short passing fad or a life altering experience. so tell your friends, to get with my friends and we can be friends!"

clearly, i was an idiot. or maybe friendster just turned idiotic, taking me down with it. once friendster started mass sending me updates about everyone's blogs, tracking where i went, providing "he/she/it updated profile/pictures/etc" announcements, when someone last logged in, it had clearly landed in the "this is evil" category.

then i found myspace. or more accurately, i was forced to find myspace. it was research for work, i swear. no sane person over the age of twenty(-five) would willingly get myspace nowadays. i had always avoided myspace just like i had avoided xanga. it was ugly, it was popular, it was populated by annoying people and ugly site design. but then i dipped my toe into the myspace world and what did i find? that the realities of myspace were even worse than my preconceptions.

first off, myspace is just garish. there's no other word to describe it. you should not let people choose their own backgrounds and color combinations when invariably they lean towards something utterly ridiculous and an illegible blend of pink and puke. myspace and xanga are the two ugliest widely used internet sites ever. it disgusts me. everything looks like a home page made during computer science 101. it's nasty. and it doesn't help when everyone is leaving their idiotic messages, pictures, logos, giant fonts and stuff all over the place. ugh. kill me now.

and i don't understand this whole public messaging phenonemon. i mean, i sort of get it. some people wanted two hundred friendsters; okay, got it. some people like to talk to each other publicly; okay, sorta get it. but what's the point? i realize i'm being a bit hypocritical here since i blog all the time but really, is exchanging "hi, how are you!? no, how are you?!" messages back and forth really that exciting? nobody is saying anything of substance on these messages and you're basically left with a giant mass of ugly messages that don't go beyond "have a nice day!" i don't get it. at least friendster testimonials kind of made sense -- in a weird easy to make fun of way. but public emailing? it makes no sense at all.

myspace is the ultimate stalking site. you can pretty much figure out what a person does, or likes to do, by sifting through their myspace pages. i can't even begin to tackle the question of "why stalk?" everyone stalks, it happens. but more importantly, with a site like myspace, you have to wonder about the mentality of the people who enjoy the stalking. why are people having public one-line email exchanges? because it fills an attention void? because it's something to do? i'd understand if it was a form of entertainment, but i can't see how it would be that entertaining after awhile. what does it do that keeps people coming back for more?

this quick peek into the world of myspace really makes me question the people who live and die by the site. i am not above a little online social networking for shits and giggles but really, stop the madness, stop the myspace. not that this message will really reach anyone to help them out since everyone is already on or off of the myspace bandwagon.

useful myspace facts to be dusted off at parties:

• myspace was founded in july 2003
• it was bought out in 2005 for $580 million by rupert murdoch
• it's regularly top five in traffic rankings for english websites
• it has 54 million registered users, compared to 24 million for friendster
• myspace accounts for 10% of all internet advertisments viewed