Beccaning Call

Rant: MySpace

Now while i love Bobby, this simply isn't true:

" P.S. Myspace is so far superior to Facebook it's not even funny. "

MySpace has 38 million (and counting) registered users.
It's the 5th most visited site on the Internet.
It is ridiculously more pointless than Facebook.

It seems to just be full of 30 million 16-19 year olds whining about their exes and putting stupid backgrounds on their profiles so you can't even read them while my chemical romance blasts in the background while you, the visitor, clambor to turn it off. They all have the same haircut and user pic, the blank-expression-caught-on-a-web-cam,the i'm-too-cool-to-just-look-at-the-camera-and-smile-like-a-normal-person picture.

The other 8 million fall into a number of other categories: Buff shirtless guys that sound like morons, weird 32 year olds that obviously have nothing better to do, and bands that are hyping their music. This seems to be the one productive thing about the site -- the creators of MySpace even recently launched their own record label.

At the end of the summer, media mogul Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace's parent company, Intermix Media, for a reported $580 million.

I worked on a story about social networking sites at the beginning of the year, and the figures on MySpace intrigued me. I signed up and started looking around the other week, and it's been a complete waste of time. I know I'm biased, and the total amount of time i've spent on MySpace adds up to about 4 hours, but through idle browsing, NONE of the people seemed interesting. Yet, it's INCREDIBLY popular. I'm gonna assume that I'm just missing the point and 38 million people cannot be that boring and unoriginal.

Facebook is out of control, but it's entertaining and at least serves a purpose: You bookmark your friends and they bookmark you, hooray! Most people seem to be on it just to be connected; rarely do people list EVERY detail about their lives on Facebook. Not the case with MySpace. My cousin is even on there, acting like the queen of the emo-ites. Her page title is /////this girl is death/////. Number 1, no, she's not, and number 2, WTF? I mean, i was in high school too. I went through my aggro-metal phase, with the Korn and the Limp Bizkit, et al (shut up), but at the time, it was a great experience with a group of friends in real life.

Bottom line: I think it's just weird to try and connect with/meet people over the internet. AIM/Facebook is one thing, bc you are friends with the people you're talking to. And you actually hang out in real life. Cyberspace communities seem so intangible that i don't see how you can derive any real satisfaction from that.

End of rant.

posted by Becca @ 12:54 AM