MySpace Newbie

June 9th, 2006

Upon showing a neighbor Bottle Cap-O-Rama, his first comment was to promote it on MySpace. So earlier this week I signed up for an account, and got a brutal introduction to the strangeness contained therein. Yes, I know it’s been around for quite some time, but I always thought of it as a website for the 25 and under crowd. I’m past the point of seeing music as a large part of my identity, and therefore never saw the point of MySpace, either.

So my first impressions may reveal my age. It’s very ugly, slow, and covered with stupid, youth-centric ads. The customization options are terrible. It seems the only way to get any kind of CSS styling is to “hack” it by pasting a style sheet into the body of the code. Ugh. Does this site validate?

That being said, the other day a friend of mine whom I hadn’t heard from in a while linked up to me via MySpace. So already I’m seeing some strange serendipitous benefit. And I must admit, it’s kind of handy to have that option of just linking to someone. So MySpace has strengths in social networking, but only insofar as most of the people you know (and want to meet) are on the site.

To sum up, ugliness aside, it seems to be where a lot of people presently “are.” Kind of like the dive bar at the end of the busy street with the Crazy Climber video game and the crappy burgers and fries. It’s familiar and a lot of people recognize it. It grows on you.

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